Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (/ˈbrɒdski/; Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский [ɪˈosʲɪf ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈbrotskʲɪj] ( listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.
For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Bad literature is a form of treason.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.
I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.
I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.