323 Quotes by Joseph Brodsky

"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."

"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."

"This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising."

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

"The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed."

"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."

"If there is any substitute for love, it is memory"

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

"When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness."