Joseph Brodsky quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Joseph Brodsky on Wise Famous Quotes.

If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.

I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.

When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...

Buenas noches.
Don't mind the roaches.

For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.

And geography blended
with time equals destiny.

The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles

What's happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it's egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.

What paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life.

secrecy is a hotbed of vanity

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there - well or poorly.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.

I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.

The Constitution doesn't mention rain.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

Man is what he reads.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity.

I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

I don't have principles. I have nerves.

I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.

What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.

There are far more a worst crimes than burning books ... Not reading them.

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.

Every life has a file, if you will.

...and love, as an act, lacks a verb

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore ...

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?

[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

The Last Judgement is the Last Judgement, but a human being who spent his life in Russia, has to be, without any hesitation, placed into Paradise.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech

Now to die of grief
would mean, I'm afraid, to die
belatedly, while latecomers
are unwelcome, particularly in the future ...

Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim's logo.

The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on West-Running Brook.

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.

The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.