Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Everything is just so much more romantic and real when it's yours and it's private.

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

It sounds so trite, but my private life is mine.

My anonymity is something I treasure.

I'm a private person in many ways.

My version of Dolly was mine, and it shouldn't be anyone else's.

I do like having a private life.

Not everybody can see every moment of their life displayed by one set of people. It's just not going to happen.

All I can say is every relationship is different, and every personality, and everyone handles every couple's social media differently.

Love is a thing you never can share.

Remember, you are all alone in the kitchen and no one can see you.

If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

The two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection are that a thing is your own and that it is your only one.

It's vital to have your own space so you aren't constantly in each other's pockets.

I am not jealous of what came before me. Come with a man on your shoulders, come with a hundred men in your hair, come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet, come like a river full of drowned men which flows down to the wild sea, to the eternal surf, to Time! Bring them all to where I am waiting for you; we shall always be alone, we shall always be you and I alone on earth, to start our life!

Whatever you do, in the privacy of your own rain shower, is your own business

Mine, ... Mine is what she is.

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.

What is mine, even to my life, is hers I love; but the secret of my friend is not mine!

It was the same night I gave myself to him completely, knowing that I would belong to him for as long as he wanted to keep me. And, as it turned out, even longer than that.

The man of genius, like a dog with a bone, or the slave who has swallowed a diamond, or a patient with the gravel, sits afar and retired, off the road, hangs out no sign of refreshment for man and beast, but says, by all possible hints and signs, I wish to be alone,--good-by,--fare-well. But the Landlord can afford to live without privacy.

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

She’s my mate; that makes her mine. Forgetting that will see your neck no longer serving its purpose.” “I love it when you talk dirty,” she purred. “Give my regards to Lindsay.

Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations.