Joseph Brodsky Quotes: top 84 famous quotes about Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky Quotes & Sayings

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

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. — Joseph Brodsky

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race? — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Buenas noches.
Don't mind the roaches. — Joseph Brodsky

And geography blended
with time equals destiny. — Joseph Brodsky

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. — Joseph Brodsky

How delightful to find a friend in everyone. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ... — Joseph Brodsky

secrecy is a hotbed of vanity — Joseph Brodsky

For darkness restores what light cannot repair. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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. — Joseph Brodsky

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. — Joseph Brodsky

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. — Joseph Brodsky

The Constitution doesn't mention rain. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

Man is what he reads. — Joseph Brodsky

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

I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. — Joseph Brodsky

I don't have principles. I have nerves. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

Every life has a file, if you will. — Joseph Brodsky

...and love, as an act, lacks a verb — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

[Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow. — Sigrid Nunez

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

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

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is what is gained in translation. — Joseph Brodsky

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Bad literature is a form of treason. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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