One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse,… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
Whenever one pulls the trigger in order to rectify history's mistake, one lies. For history makes no mistakes, since it has no… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
It is almost a rule that the more complex a man is, the simpler his billing. A person with a retrospective ability… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
“Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write better Russian than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly.… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share Image
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.' — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
“In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
“What gets left of a man amounts to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
“The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles” — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it… — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people. — Joseph Brodsky Copy Share
