Joseph Brodsky Quotes

The older you get, the more you find yourself looking for things you used to see and liked when you were younger.

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.

I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

I don't know why it is, but sometimes I feel like I'm 60. It's like I've been around for a long time. I felt that way even when I was 8.

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

I feel it was just a few years ago I was running around in short pants.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

A lot of things you see as a child remain with you... you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.

It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

Me? I'm going to grow backwards and be a kid again.

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

I suppose you always look back at how easier things were being young. There's always a shame that you're not as naive as you were.

When I went to Munich, I was perhaps a little too young.

When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you are young. It is almost like looking down from heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you just don't know it.

But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.

Don't you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?

I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back. Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn't make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child, of long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of or hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded and terribly vulnerable to joy.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.

Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

When I was little the sky was closer.