Brodsky Quotes & Sayings

What can a state institution teach us? In what way can I be reformed by a penal colony and you by, say, Russian TV Channel 1? In his Nobel lecture, Joseph Brodsky said, 'The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.' We in Russia once again find ourselves in a situation where resistance, especially aesthetic resistance, becomes the only viable moral choice as well as a civic duty." Nadya — Masha Gessen

Judge: And what is your occupation in general?
Brodsky: Poet, poet-translator.
Judge: And who recognized you to be a poet? Who put you in the ranks of poet?
Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity?
Judge: Did you study it? ... How to be a poet? Did you attempt to finish an insitute of higher learning ... where they prepare ... teach
Brodsky: I did not think that it is given to one by education.
Judge: By what then?
Brodsky: I think that it is from God. — Joseph Brodsky

It's fascinating, really," she says. "The science has led to an answer, which is emotions. It is all about emotions. People don't make the purchasing decisions that they make because they've done a double-blind taste test. They do it because of how a product or a service makes them feel. This has shown us that it's what we really need to be doing to be different, and what we really need to tap into to wow the consumer. — Howard Brodsky

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

What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech — Joseph Brodsky

Buenas noches.
Don't mind the roaches. — Joseph Brodsky

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony. — Joseph Brodsky

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

Tasting scotch was an intense experience; it didn't have the lovely layering of wines, — Daniella Brodsky

For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus. — Joseph Brodsky

Sexism justifies itself by commandeering our logic and, quietly, the limits of what is constrict our ideas of what should be. Misogyny comes to taste like air, feel like gravity: so common we barely notice it, so entrenched it's hard to conceive of a world without it. So — Alexandra Brodsky

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or main drags but at the assembly plant's gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don't see why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because you don't want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, it's because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and the destinations that I have in mind don't exist. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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 moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. — Joseph Brodsky

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. — Joseph Brodsky

Every life has a file, if you will. — Joseph Brodsky

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

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins. — Joseph Brodsky

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time. — Joseph Brodsky

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

Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite. — Joseph Brodsky

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

Throughout one's life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book's suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry. Akhmatova's — Joseph Brodsky

[Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow. — Sigrid Nunez

The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything. — Joseph Brodsky

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. — Joseph Brodsky

I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am. — Joseph Brodsky

For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language. — Joseph Brodsky

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. — Joseph Brodsky

VIII
O when so much has been and gone
behind you - grief, to say the least
expect no help from anyone.
Board a train, get to the coast.
It's wider and it's deeper. This
superiority's not a thing
of joy especially. Mind you, if
one has to feel as orphans do,
better in places where the view
stirs somehow and cannot sting. — Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is what is gained in translation. — Joseph Brodsky

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. — Joseph Brodsky

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. — Joseph Brodsky

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it. — Joseph Brodsky

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

The Constitution doesn't mention rain. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

secrecy is a hotbed of vanity — Joseph Brodsky

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

What's all this about sin, eh?'
'That,' I said, very sick. 'Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.' And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.
'Music,' said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. 'So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?'
'It can't be helped,' said Dr. Branom. 'Each man kills the thing he loves ... — Anthony Burgess

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

How delightful to find a friend in everyone. — Joseph Brodsky

Susan, Susan -- Poetry: aviation! Prose: infantry. [to Susan Sontag] — Joseph Brodsky

It really does look like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to mention the violin necks of gondolas. In fact, the whole city, especially at night, resembles a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves, with the falsetto of a star in the winter sky. — Joseph Brodsky

This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising. — Joseph Brodsky

If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore ... — Joseph Brodsky

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence. — Joseph Brodsky

We are each other's angels, we meet when it is time. — Chuck Brodsky

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. — Joseph Brodsky

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. — Joseph Brodsky

For darkness restores what light cannot repair. — Joseph Brodsky

When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both. — 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'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary. — Joseph Brodsky

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

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then. — Joseph Brodsky

I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything. — 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

...and love, as an act, lacks a verb — 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

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow. — 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

Bad literature is a form of treason. — Joseph Brodsky

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse — 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

Now to die of grief
would mean, I'm afraid, to die
belatedly, while latecomers
are unwelcome, particularly in the future ... — Joseph Brodsky

Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. — Joseph Brodsky

[T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. — Joseph Brodsky

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

I don't have principles. I have nerves. — Joseph Brodsky

It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. — 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

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

Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those
in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists ... — Joseph Brodsky

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. — Joseph Brodsky

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process. — Joseph Brodsky

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go. — Joseph Brodsky

Literature sort of makes your daily operation, your daily conduct, the management of your affairs in the society a bit more complex. And it puts what you do in perspective, and people don't like to see themselves or their activities in perspective. They don't feel quite comfortable with that. Nobody wants to acknowledge the insignificance of his life, and that is very often the net result of reading a poem. — Joseph Brodsky

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is ... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it. — 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

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

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. — Joseph Brodsky

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon. — Joseph Brodsky

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

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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