"What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness."
"Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those-in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists."
7 likes
Source: On Grief and Reason: Essays. Book by Joseph Brodsky, 1995.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Joseph Brodsky
"Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens."
"Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets."
"How delightful to find a friend in everyone."
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
"A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny."