Joseph Brodsky Quotes - Page 2

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Constitution doesn't mention rain.

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

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

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

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every life has a file, if you will.

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

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

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

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.

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.