Joseph Brodsky Quotes
Collection of 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
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
The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
— 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
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
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
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
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
![Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Sigrid Nunez: [Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/joseph-brodsky-quotes-by-sigrid-nunez-331033.jpg "Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Sigrid Nunez: [Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting")
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
— Joseph Brodsky
![Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Joseph Brodsky: [T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable,](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/joseph-brodsky-quotes-by-joseph-brodsky-515059.jpg "Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Joseph Brodsky: [T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable,")
[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
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
Now to die of griefwould 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
![Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Joseph Brodsky: [T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/joseph-brodsky-quotes-by-joseph-brodsky-662392.jpg "Joseph Brodsky Quotes By Joseph Brodsky: [T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not")
[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