Joseph Brodsky
46 quotes
Biography
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, anglicized as Joseph, was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."
"For darkness restores what light cannot repair."
"Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse"
"The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your own skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs."
"For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for."
"You know, when you go outside on the streets after having spent the day writing, you feel like a foreign body, even in your own country. This sensation perhaps feels more natural when you are really outside your country."
"This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s."
"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."
"It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being."
"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."
"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"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."
"Man is what he reads."
"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."
"Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."
"Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."
"The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie."
"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."
"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."
"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."
"[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you."
"[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis."
"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."
"I belong to the Russian language. 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."