Joseph Brodsky Quotes

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

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

“An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.”

“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.”

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

“Man is what he reads.”

“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.”

“It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being.”

“The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time.”

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

“The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”