Quotes from Joseph Brodsky

No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term.

The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.

A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

Life-the way it really is-is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home. No matter how you lived there-well or poorly.

What concerns me is that man, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to act violently, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective.

T]he longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

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

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.