Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

Believe your pain.' This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.

The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles

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.

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.

There are places in which things don't change. These are a substitute for one's memory.

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

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.

Still, if it comes to the point where the blue acrylic dappled with cirrus suggests the Lord, say Give me strength to sustain the hurt, and learn it by heart like a decent lyric.

An eyelid is twitching. From the open mouth gushes silence. The cities of Europe mount each other at railroad stations. A pleasant odor of soap tells the jungle dweller of the approaching foe. Wherever you set your sole or toe, the world map develops blank spots, grows balder.

A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.

The upper lip is like a groom, to wit: The lower lip is like his fiancee. But that which splits in two will surely split into two hundred just as easily. And everything that's been twofold is then accountable, is then no longer moot.

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.