Joseph Brodsky Quotes

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.

How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison?

In my mind I'm a blind man doin' time.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

There's no way out of here.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

There is no ship now that can bear me hence

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.

Imagine how frustrating it is, being completely locked up and watching your family leave, your wife and children, and not being able to do anything about it.

When you're in prison, you can't do anything about what's happening outside.

What use would wings be to a man bound in iron fetters? They would only drive him to even greater despair.

Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it's supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There's nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.

Be still my tongue, for i know not what to say; My life is lived in darkness and here i will remain.

You jackass. We're all going to die here. You know that, right?' Harrier said. Yeah," Eugens said shakily. '...Guess I might as well die here with you as out on the desert with a bunch of other jackasses.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

A pedestal is the most insidious prison ever devised.

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.