Joseph Brodsky Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Joseph Brodsky:
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
~Joseph Brodsky
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.
~Joseph Brodsky
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My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one's task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one's own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends.
~Joseph Brodsky
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An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.
~Joseph Brodsky
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No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.
~Joseph Brodsky
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It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability gone rampant often would be called an historian. Similarly, one to whom reality doesn't seem to make sense gets dubbed a philosopher.
~Joseph Brodsky
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To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
~Joseph Brodsky
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As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like claiming 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
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I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
~Joseph Brodsky
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After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Literature invents its own rules.
~Joseph Brodsky
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
~Joseph Brodsky
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It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.
~Joseph Brodsky
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With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
~Joseph Brodsky
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world's greatest experts. They bested time like no one else.
~Joseph Brodsky
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This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
~Joseph Brodsky
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By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.
~Joseph Brodsky
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What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'
~Joseph Brodsky
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Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.
~Joseph Brodsky
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A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
~Joseph Brodsky
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A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
~Joseph Brodsky
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Man is what he reads.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.
~Joseph Brodsky
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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
~Joseph Brodsky
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To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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I remember rather little of my life, and what I do remember is of small consequence.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language.
~Joseph Brodsky
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I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
~Joseph Brodsky
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On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
~Joseph Brodsky
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For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'
~Joseph Brodsky
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My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
~Joseph Brodsky
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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
~Joseph Brodsky
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Life has a great deal up its sleeve.
~Joseph Brodsky
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This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
~Joseph Brodsky
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
~Joseph Brodsky
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
~Joseph Brodsky
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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
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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
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