Joseph Brodsky Quotes

The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk.

Thou seaman-prince! thy men are paid: The scat on Gotlanders is laid; Young man or old To our seamen bold Must pay, to save his head: The Yngling princes fled, Eysvssel people bled; Who can't defend the wealth they have Must die, or share with the rover brave

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came.

Everyone in Denmark has at least two or three sailors in their family; sea travel is part of the DNA of our nation, and because of that, I'd always wanted to tell a story aboard a ship.

Denmark is a country built on a commercial fleet. That's basically what we have been doing. We're just a small country of islands, and every family has a sailor. So, in many ways, my father was a sailor before I was born.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

So that between the Cape of St. Maria and Japan we were four months and twenty-two days; at which time there were no more than six besides myself that could stand upon his feet.

Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.

I'd always been interested in maritime history, especially the great liners. I'd have done a book about the Titanic if it hadn't already been done to death by James Cameron and Celine Dion.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

Venice is eternity itself.

We've got a yawl named the Phebe, which is named for a boat in a whaling journal my father and I edited. We keep a copy of the journal on board.

My own wandering blood comes from my seafaring grandfather, who, after he had left the sea and settled on shore, still governed his house by a ship's rules.

Some men play golf. I've got this crazy thing about maintaining our nation's maritime heritage.

My inspiration has always been photography's ability to stop time and reveal what the naked eye cannot see.

I have already bent time to my will.

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.

My father was a welder on the second-highest sail, so the Opera House has a special place in my heart.

Commercial fishing is always so behind the curve of technology that they were building ships with wooden hulls and masts in the 1940s, though it also had a diesel engine, which probably was used most of the time.

You forget, time doesn't exist anymore. You gave it to me.

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again?

You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never moves you. It has lost its ability to affect you. What is it they say? That time is theft? But not for you. Close your eyes and you can start all over again. Conjure up that necessary emotion, fresh as roses.