Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Everything has to do with geography.

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

History is not intelligible without geography.

If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.

In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

I don't want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.

Something that has been every important to me in all my projects has been location, the place where they are installed.

Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things.

Geography is destiny.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time.

Africa's not a color - it's a place.

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

Even the Gods cannot change the past.

Each day has its own destiny. Yesterday is history, today is opportunity while tomorrow is mystery.

Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.

Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

Our last deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.

For whatever you're doing, for your creative juices, your geography's got a hell of a lot to do with it. You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.

The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.