Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

Suicide] is the essence of self-portraiture.

O God in heaven, if you're so designed that you can listen to two voices blast at once from but one set of lips and find in them not noise but strife between the past and future, raise to you my coughing mind and plant its microbes where your light is cast. Divide among them with your mighty hand the sum of these convulsive thoughts and days. And leave the fraction of me left behind to triumph over silence then, at least.

Painted by a gentle dawn one is proud that like one's own planet now one will not wince at what one is facing, since putting up with nothing whose company we cannot lose hardens rocks and -rather fast- hearts as well. But rocks will last.

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

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.

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.

The more invisible something is, the more certain it's been around, and the more obviously it's everywhere.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours." —

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

A je?li kto? ci? zapyta kim jeste??, to odpowiedz Ja jestem Nikt - jak rzek? niegdy? Polifemowi Odys.

Un romanzo o una poesia non è un monologo, bensì una conversazione tra uno scrittore e un lettore: una conversazione, ripeto, del tutto privata, che esclude tutti gli altri – un atto, se si vuole, di reciproca misantropia.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

A bullet's velocity in low temperatures greatly depends on its target's virtues

Muttering, rolling our eyeballs upward, we are becoming a new kind of bivalve

In the afterlife, the pain that kills here no doubt continues.

Liberdade é quando você esquece o nome do tirano.

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

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

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

Zawsze szuka ratunku ten, komu Å›wiat runÄ…Å' i potrzebna jest pomoc, bo pogubiÅ' nogi, a w dodatku nie widzi Å›niegu. PóÅ'noc. PóÅ'noc. Wszystko to prowokuje do tego stwierdzenia, które nocÄ… z podwójnÄ… ostroÅ›ciÄ… siÄ™ jawi: jedni siÄ™ nie spalajÄ… w tych samych pÅ'omieniach, które z innych tymczasem mogÄ… pozostawi? poÅ'owÄ™ ich postaci zaledwie (...)

Men can return to where they have done evil deeds, but men do not return to where they've been abased. On this point God's design and our own feeling of abasement coincide so absolutely that we quit: the night, the rotting beast, the exultant mobs, our homes, our hearthfires, Bacchus in a vacant lot embracing Ariadne in the dark.

None of us are sovereign over others, although to such ill-omened thoughts we cling.

And wagged our shaven heads, in that place where men spit on floors -- where sometimes we are given fish to eat, but never knife or fork to eat it with.

Your life is a sheer gift.