Joseph Brodsky Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

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
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
Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment.

Joseph Brodsky
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.

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

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
Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?... Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

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

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

Joseph Brodsky
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.

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
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