Joseph Brodsky Quotes

What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?

Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

No magic. I do believe you might have taken it all with you when you went away.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

One day you're there and then all of a sudden, there's less of you. And you wonder where that part went. If it's living somewhere outside of you. And you keep thinking maybe you'll get it back. And then you realize it's just gone.

Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.

Gone - flitted away, Taken the stars from the night and the sun From the day! Gone, and a cloud in my heart.

The past is a bucket of ashes

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Visiting old haunts is hard on memory. Things shrink, change, and disappear.

That you are not already golden word in our streets Already memories Your love fades Already Whether you are no longer to have perished.