Robert Bly Quotes

If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.

We make the path by walking.

Adulthood has something to do with not choosing any of the pure points of view, but living about half of what you really want to live.

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'

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.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.

The lead either forges an instant connection with the reader, or the package fails.

What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.

People tend to take stories literally these days.

To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.

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.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

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 work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

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 trying to get them out again.

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.

There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.

I want nothing from You but to see You.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.

Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

During the patriarchal time, the men were always and invariably dominant, legally and socially in marriage, so now it's possible to remodel the entire house of marriage, put in new footings and new joists and a new sort of interior. That is exactly what some men and women are now doing.

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

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 in high school do not work in life.

The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.