On Grief and Reason Quotes

“...boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life--...the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. 'You are finite,' time tells you in a voice of boredom, 'and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.' As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequence and the attendant self-satisfaction.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays

“love is an attitude toward reality – usually of someone finite toward something infinite.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“Believe your pain.’ This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“secrecy is a hotbed of vanity”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays

“What’s wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the speed with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the biblical prophets: revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished to go. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I suppose, what they call a poet.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced, and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward -especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well - is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present - for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays

“Plain and simply, a love lyric is one’s soul set in motion. If it’s good, it may do the same to you.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or main drags but at the assembly plant’s gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don’t see why what’s done for cars can’t be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because you don’t want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, it’s because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and the destinations that I have in mind don’t exist.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason: Essays

“In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet's terrifying self-portrait.”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief And Reason

“We have, all of us, more reasons for staying than for marching. What's the point in marching if you are only going to catch up with a very sad tune?”
― Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays