Quotes About 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.

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.

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 still writing in Russian.

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

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

For some odd reason, the expression 'death of a poet' always sounds somewhat more concrete than 'life of a poet.'

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.