Brodsky Quotes

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. ~ 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

O God in heaven, if you're so designed
that you can listen to two voices blast
at once from but one set of lips and find
in them not noise but strife between the past
and future, raise to you my coughing mind
and plant its microbes where your light is cast.
Divide among them with your mighty hand
the sum of these convulsive thoughts and days.
And leave the fraction of me left behind
to triumph over silence then, at least. ~ 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

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

Poetry is what is gained in translation. ~ 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

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

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

In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. ~ 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

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

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

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

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

A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination ... ~ Joseph Brodsky

A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

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

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

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

Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics. ~ 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

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

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

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

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I'm Evil!" That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state. ~ Joseph Brodsky

The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one. ~ Joseph Brodsky

More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

I am no longer scared of being a woman - it doesn't make me any less a man. I am both. I am neither. I am only myself. ~ Jordanna Max 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

For darkness restores what light cannot repair. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Bad literature is a form of treason. ~ 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

Nothing reveals a poet's weakness like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged. ~ Joseph Brodsky

A Song

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish you sat on the sofa
and I sat near.
The handkerchief could be yours,
the tear could be mine, chin-bound.
Though it could be, of course,
the other way around.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish we were in my car
and you'd shift the gear.
We'd find ourselves elsewhere,
on an unknown shore.
Or else we'd repair
to where we've been before.

I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear,
when the moon skims the water
that sighs and shifts in its slumber.
I wish it were still a quarter
to dial your number.

I wish you were here, dear,
in this hemisphere,
as I sit on the porch
sipping a beer.
It's evening, the sun is setting;
boys shout and gulls are crying.
What's the point of forgetting
if it's followed by dying? ~ Joseph Brodsky

After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor. ~ 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

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

Like you, I am woman and more than woman. I have felt a woman's pain, but I have hunted like a man. Who else has lived both lives? ~ Jordanna Max 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

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

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

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

secrecy is a hotbed of vanity ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

Man is what he reads. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity. ~ 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

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

The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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 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

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. ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

And Desormie dragged the back of his hand back and forth across his mouth twice. And Brodsky coughed fakely to mask his laughter. And there was no more paste in the mouth-corners of Desormie. And Brodsky would not have to stare at paste while they talked in his office. That was nice of me.

I went to the gym. ~ Adam Levin

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production. ~ Joseph Brodsky

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph. ~ Joseph Brodsky

While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who'd hurt him, and it didn't matter that I hadn't wanted to hurt him or that I didn't know how I'd hurt him. It didn't matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn't need a name to be wrong. It didn't need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry. ~ Adam Levin

The more invisible something is,
the more certain it's been around,
and the more obviously it's everywhere. ~ 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

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

There are few sounds at night on the frozen sea besides the roar of the wind. No plants to rustle, no waves to crash upon the shore, no birds to caw. The white owl flies on hushed wings. The white fox walks with silent tread. Even Inuit move as softly as spirits, the snow too hard to yield and crunch beneath our boots. We hear little, but what we do hear is vital: the exploding breath of a surfacing seal, the shift and crack of drifting ice. But in the forest there is always sound. The trees, even in their shrouds of snow, are alive, and their voices--groans, creaks, screams--never cease. ~ Jordanna Max 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

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

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

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

The Constitution doesn't mention rain. ~ Joseph Brodsky

I remember one day - the day I had to leave after a month here alone. I had just had lunch in some small tratoria on the remotest part of the Fondamente Nuove, grilled fish and half a bottle of wine. With that inside, I set out for the place I was staying, to collect my bags and catch a vaporetto. I walked a quarter of a mile along the Fondamente Nuove, a small moving dot in that gigantic watercolor, and then turned right by the hospital of Giovanni e Paolo. The day was warm, sunny, the sky blue, all lovely. And with my back to the Fondamente and San Michele, hugging the wall of the hospital, almost rubbing it with my left shoulder and squinting at the sun, I suddenly felt : I am a cat. A cat that has just had a fish. Had anyone addressed me at that moment, I would have meowed. I was absolutely, animally happy. Twelve hours later, of course, having landed in New York, I hit the worst possible mess in my life - or the one that appeared that way at the time. Yet the cat in me lingered; had it not been for the cat, I'd be climbing the walls now in some expensive institution. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

Following the flame-haired giant with his gentle touch and wicked blade.
The wolf in the whale had gone south. and so did I. ~ Jordanna Max Brodsky

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.
(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy) ~ Joseph Brodsky

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

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

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

[T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you. ~ 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

What paradise and vacation have in common is that you have to pay for both, and the coin is your previous life. ~ Joseph Brodsky

A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one's retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina's, as well as the tear's, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one's eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feel final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is banishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best, to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye's future. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens. ~ 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