Joseph Brodsky

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.

— Joseph Brodsky

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.

— Joseph Brodsky

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

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.

— Joseph Brodsky

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

I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.

— Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

— Joseph Brodsky

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

— Joseph Brodsky

Man is what he reads.

— Joseph Brodsky

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

— Joseph Brodsky

I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.

— Joseph Brodsky

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

— Joseph Brodsky

Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

— Joseph Brodsky

Ah, how much more soothing

— Joseph Brodsky

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

— Joseph Brodsky

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

— Joseph Brodsky

In terms of freedom, America doesn't invite any comparison to Russia. It would be silly to make one. Every line that I care to write, I can have printed. There is no point to even talk about degrees.

— Joseph Brodsky