Top 100 Joseph Brodsky Quotes
#2. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.
Joseph Brodsky
#3. There are far more a worst crimes than burning books ... Not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#4. I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
Joseph Brodsky
#6. This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
Joseph Brodsky
#7. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.
Joseph Brodsky
#8. For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
#9. Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential
with his sense of what he is capable of.
Joseph Brodsky
#10. What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.
Joseph Brodsky
#11. Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky
#13. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
Joseph Brodsky
#14. It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
Joseph Brodsky
#15. It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).
Joseph Brodsky
#16. 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
#17. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.
Joseph Brodsky
#19. After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
Joseph Brodsky
#20. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#21. Painted by a gentle dawn
one is proud that like one's own
planet now one will not wince
at what one is facing, since
putting up with nothing whose
company we cannot lose
hardens rocks and -rather fast-
hearts as well. But rocks will last.
Joseph Brodsky
#23. Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky
#24. In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
Joseph Brodsky
#25. The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity.
Joseph Brodsky
#26. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.
Joseph Brodsky
#27. It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Joseph Brodsky
#28. If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
#29. A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.
Joseph Brodsky
#30. Now to die of grief
would mean, I'm afraid, to die
belatedly, while latecomers
are unwelcome, particularly in the future ...
Joseph Brodsky
#31. 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
#32. A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
Joseph Brodsky
#33. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.
Joseph Brodsky
#34. 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
#35. Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]
Joseph Brodsky
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.
Joseph Brodsky
#42. 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
#43. Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
Joseph Brodsky
#44. Believe your pain.' This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.
Joseph Brodsky
#45. The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Joseph Brodsky
#46. All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.
Joseph Brodsky
#47. If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.
Joseph Brodsky
#49. In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.
Joseph Brodsky
#50. I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
Joseph Brodsky
#51. When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.
Joseph Brodsky
#52. Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them.
Joseph Brodsky
#53. The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
Joseph Brodsky
#54. What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Joseph Brodsky
#56. In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.
Joseph Brodsky
#57. [T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.
Joseph Brodsky
#58. Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...
Joseph Brodsky
#59. I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky
#60. I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
Joseph Brodsky
#61. Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
Joseph Brodsky
#62. 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
#64. It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one's emotional life. There's always enough work to do, not to mention that there's world enough outside.
Joseph Brodsky
#65. 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
#66. Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.
Joseph Brodsky
#67. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#69. Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Joseph Brodsky
#70. I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.
Joseph Brodsky
#71. In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
Joseph Brodsky
#72. 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
#73. The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
Joseph Brodsky
#74. I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.
Joseph Brodsky
#75. 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
#76. Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
Joseph Brodsky
#77. As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .
Joseph Brodsky
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech
Joseph Brodsky
#82. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
Joseph Brodsky
#83. 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
#84. If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore ...
Joseph Brodsky
#85. What paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life.
Joseph Brodsky
#86. I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.
Joseph Brodsky
#88. The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles
Joseph Brodsky
#89. Opera and church recitals are options, of course, but they require some initiative and arrangement: tickets and schedules and so forth. I am not good at that; it's rather like fixing a three-course meal for yourself - perhaps even lonelier.
Joseph Brodsky
#91. The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
Joseph Brodsky
#92. I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
Joseph Brodsky
#93. In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
Joseph Brodsky
#94. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
Joseph Brodsky
#95. My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
Joseph Brodsky
#96. Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.
Joseph Brodsky
#97. A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
#98. 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
#99. 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
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