Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth’s surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.

— Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Plain and simply, a love lyric is one’s soul set in motion. If it’s good, it may do the same to you.

— Joseph Brodsky

More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.

— Joseph Brodsky

In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.

— Joseph Brodsky

Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.

— Joseph Brodsky

It is a virtue, I came to believe long ago, not to make a meal out of one’s emotional life. There’s always enough work to do, not to mention that there’s world enough outside.

— Joseph Brodsky

A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.

— Joseph Brodsky

Love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.

— Joseph Brodsky

In the end, there’s always this city. As long as it exists, I don’t believe that I, or for that matter, anyone, can be mesmerized or blinded by romantic tragedy.

— Joseph Brodsky

Romance

What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.

— Joseph Brodsky

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even – if you will – eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin – not even by a minority.

— Joseph Brodsky

The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.

— Joseph Brodsky

The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.

— Joseph Brodsky

It’s a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.” –.

— Joseph Brodsky

A word’s fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.

— Joseph Brodsky

Scratch on, my pen: let’s mark the white the way it marks us.

— Joseph Brodsky

Nothing reveals a poet’s weakness like classical verse, and that’s why it’s so universally dodged.

— Joseph Brodsky

If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

— Joseph Brodsky

To have another life, one ought to be able to wrap up the first one, and the job should be done neatly.

— Joseph Brodsky

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.

— Joseph Brodsky

A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.

— Joseph Brodsky

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