Joseph Brodsky - On Grief and Reason: Essays (1995)

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

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

Joseph Brodsky