Man is What he Reads

“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

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“For darkness restores what light cannot repair.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
― Joseph Brodsky

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.”
― 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

“Man is what he reads.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

“...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays

“If there is any substitute for love, it is memory.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“For a writer, only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.”
― Joseph Brodsky

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

“An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

“...and love, as an act, lacks a verb”
― Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English

“The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“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

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

“If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore...”
― Joseph Brodsky

“The Constitution doesn't mention rain.”
― Joseph Brodsky