Quotes from book
Less Than One: Selected Essays

Name: Less Than One: Selected Essays
Author: Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky

Less Than One: Selected Essays is a collection of literary and autobiographical essays by the Russian poet and Nobel Prize-winning author Joseph Brodsky. It was published in 1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was awarded that year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The book includes essays on fellow Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov, as well as the poet W.H. Auden.

“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.”

Joseph Brodsky book Less Than One: Selected Essays

Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

“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.”

Joseph Brodsky book Less Than One: Selected Essays

Source: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), p. 14

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

Joseph Brodsky book Less Than One: Selected Essays

Source: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), p. 28
Context: The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.