Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 May 1940
CountryUnited States of America
faster surface bottom
In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
men should-have vocabulary
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.
way caught proletariat
I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
uprising glowing firsts
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
government serious consideration
The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
america what-matters achievement
In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.
country judging unions
It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
evil political eating
Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...
despair form snobbery
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
fake-people life-is-hard masters
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
reading writing thinking
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
boys opening-up skulls
I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.
mean sick facts
The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
journey doctrine departure
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.