Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

When you really can't affect something, you almost don't wanna wish too hard, because it's just frustrating.

But Hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns.

When you're obsessive, like me, searching for something unattainable can become unhealthy... it's like falling through the air and grabbing at the clouds.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

The ghosts you chase you never catch.

We shall now seek that which we shall not find

You won’t arrive. It is an endless search.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

The truth is an ambition which is beyond us.

The most frustrating part of trying to direct everything is not that it alienates you from people who genuinely want to help, but that it's actually impossible.

I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.

There are two things that won't last long in this world, and that's dogs chasing cars and pros putting for pars.

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

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 don't have Steve. There is no having the Steve.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

Many women long for what eludes them, and like not what is offered them.

If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.

He ploughs the waves, sows the sand, and hopes to gather the wind in a net, who places his hopes in the heart of a woman.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

When I wrote 'Your Republic Is Calling You,' it was Franz Kafka's writing that I had most in mind, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Entirely out of the blue, Kafka's characters receive an order to go somewhere, and when they try to comply, they never quite manage it. Ki-yong in 'Your Republic Is Calling You' is precisely that sort of character.

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.