Robert Bly Quotes

52 quotes in 775 categories

• The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
• The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature…
• There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is…
• Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the…
• I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.
• The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
• When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
• I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.
• Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
• What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul…
• Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
• It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
• By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received…
• The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place…
• I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
• We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives…
• When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to…
• Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
• As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
• We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the…

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