J Brodsky Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

For darkness restores what light cannot repair. — Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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