Joseph Brodsky Quotes

If you're playing for the Kansas City Royals about all you can do is beat your head against the wall.

Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught?

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

It is useless to live on burned ruins.

'Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

You have to give up! you have to give up! You have to realize that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless!

What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?

Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain.

The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.

The fatal futility of Fact.

If. A two-letter word for futility.

Futility is the defining characteristic of life.

Things seem to fall apart inevitably.

Why do you beat the air and run in vain? Every occupation has a purpose, obviously. Tell me then, what is the purpose of all the activity of the world? Answer, I challenge you! It is vanity of vanity: all is vanity.

Ain't no use jiving, ain't no use joking, everything is broken.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

What difference, at this point, does it make?

It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?

Of all the bitter and heavy things in this sorry old world, the not being necessary is the bitterest and heaviest.

But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.