Joseph Brodsky
From Wikiquote
Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky, (Russian:Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, better known as Joseph Brodsky) (24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996), was a Russian-American poet, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poet Laureate of the United States for 1991-1992.
Contents |
[edit] Sourced
[edit] Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)
- There was Lenin, looking like a cherub in his blonde curls. Then Lenin in his twenties and thirties, bald and uptight.
- 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.
- There isn’t an executioner who isn’t scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner.
[edit] From "Love"
- For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
[edit] Unsourced
- The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
- There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
- Unbelief is blindness, but more often piggishness.
