Top 100 Brodsky Quotes
#1. And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
Elvis Costello
#2. I looked at the empty suitcase. On the bottom was Karl Marx. On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, precious, only life.
Sergei Dovlatov
#3. [Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.
Sigrid Nunez
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. [T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.
Joseph Brodsky
#8. 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
#9. I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky
#10. Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...
Joseph Brodsky
#11. [T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.
Joseph Brodsky
#12. 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
#14. What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Joseph Brodsky
#15. The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
Joseph Brodsky
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
Joseph Brodsky
#19. In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.
Joseph Brodsky
#22. If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.
Joseph Brodsky
#23. All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.
Joseph Brodsky
#24. The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Joseph Brodsky
#25. What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right.
Joseph Brodsky
#26. 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
#27. What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech
Joseph Brodsky
#28. As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
Joseph Brodsky
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
Joseph Brodsky
#34. 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
#35. I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.
Joseph Brodsky
#36. The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
Joseph Brodsky
#37. Everyone who goes after a dream is a competitor, and their goal is the win. Anyone who chooses to work together with others toward the pursuit of a common goal is part of a team at some level.
Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld
#38. 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
#39. In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
Joseph Brodsky
#41. I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.
Joseph Brodsky
#42. The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
Joseph Brodsky
#43. 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
#45. Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
#46. 'Cause we are each other's angels And we meet when it is time We keep each other going And we show each other signs
Chuck Brodsky
#47. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#49. Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations.
Joseph Brodsky
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)
Joseph Brodsky
#54. After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
Joseph Brodsky
#56. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.
Joseph Brodsky
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.
Joseph Brodsky
#60. 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
#61. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
Joseph Brodsky
#63. Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
Joseph Brodsky
#67. Tasting scotch was an intense experience; it didn't have the lovely layering of wines,
Daniella Brodsky
#68. For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
#69. A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.
Joseph Brodsky
#70. This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
Joseph Brodsky
#72. 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
#73. We are each other's angels, we meet when it is time.
Chuck Brodsky
#74. There are far more a worst crimes than burning books ... Not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag]
Joseph Brodsky
#86. 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
#87. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.
Joseph Brodsky
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Now to die of grief
would mean, I'm afraid, to die
belatedly, while latecomers
are unwelcome, particularly in the future ...
Joseph Brodsky
#91. What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
#92. 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
#93. If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
#94. When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Joseph Brodsky
#95. It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Joseph Brodsky
#96. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.
Joseph Brodsky
#97. The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity.
Joseph Brodsky
#98. 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
#99. Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky
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