Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

I know everything should be photographed. It helps me make sense of my existence.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

What are we but our stories?

In the end, we'll all become stories.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

There is just one life for each of us: our own.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

A diary is a way of hedging one’s bets against death.

How will we know it’s us without our past?

Memory is a code to who we are, a collection of not just dates and facts but also of epic emotional struggles, epiphanies, transformations.

Nobody wants to be nameless. Nobody wanna be forgotten.

For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is, in part, a result of biology. Like other creatures, humans have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.

Everyone at a point in their life is struggling to find out who they are and where they belong.

I've always subscribed to an old Chinese proverb that the palest ink is better than the best memory.

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

I am just another dot in the world

We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Everything in-between is a gift.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.