Robert Bly Quotes & Sayings

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere. — Robert Bly

Last night in my dream a man I did not know whispered in my ear that he was disappointed with me, and that I had lost his friendship. — Robert Bly

Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness. — Robert Bly

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy. — Robert Bly

The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, — Robert Bly

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 as easily overlooked as a bee's wing — Robert Bly

TWILIGHT I have dreamed of flight. And I have dreamed of your laces strewn in the bedroom. I have dreamed of some mother walking the length of a wharf and at fifteen nursing the hour. I have dreamed of flight. A "forever" sighed at a fo'c'sle ladder. I have dreamed of a mother, of fresh sprigs of table-greens, and the stars stitched in bridals of the dawn. The length of a wharf ... the length of a drowning throat! Translated by John Knoepfle — Robert Bly

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 highest thing ... Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music. — Robert Bly

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching. — Robert Bly

Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be. Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community. — Robert Bly

A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this. — Robert Bly

And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut? — Robert Bly

BAD PEOPLE
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks - what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams - that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god - who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge - can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little. — Robert Bly

When a man says to a woman, "You are my anima," she should quickly scream and run out of the room. The word anima has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman, who wants to be loved as a woman. — Robert Bly

Angels began shining when they achieved discipline. — Robert Bly

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

Hair is intuition. Hair is the abundance of perceptions, insights, thoughts, resentments, images, fantasies waiting and ready to come out whenever we are thinking of something else. — Robert Bly

We will have to call especially loud to reach Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding In the jugs of silence filled during our wars. — Robert Bly

I am afraid there'll be a moment when
I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly
Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field
There will be no one. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

It's all right if people think we are idiots.
It's all right if we lie face down on the earth.
It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in. — Robert Bly

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

The Wild Man doesn't come to full life through being "natural," going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief. — Robert Bly

The deeper question ... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform ... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge ... — Robert Bly

It's hard to grasp how much generosity
Is involved in letting us go on breathing,
When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.
Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for
Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat
When so many have gone down in the storm. — Robert Bly

Be careful how quickly you give away your fire. — Robert Bly

My life failed on the very day I was born. — Robert Bly

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
Trees that start again. — Robert Bly

If any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality. — Robert Bly

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity. — Robert Bly

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes. — Robert Bly

Some men live with an invisible limp,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons are often angry. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

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 and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them. — Robert Bly

I knew this friendship with myself couldn't last forever. — Robert Bly

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry. — Robert Bly

Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend. — Robert Bly

I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people. — Robert Bly

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

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down. — Robert Bly

Where a man's wound is, that is where his genius will be. — Robert Bly

A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving. — Robert Bly

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness. — Robert Bly

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem. — Robert Bly

Early Morning in Your Room
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water
It seems you've traveled years to get here.
Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.
Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter
to his Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling
With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That's what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home. — Robert Bly

There's a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. — Robert Bly

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. — Robert Bly

AGAPE Today no one has come to inquire, nor have they wanted anything from me this afternoon. I have not seen a single cemetery flower in so happy a procession of lights. Forgive me, Lord! I have died so little! This afternoon everyone, everyone goes by without asking or begging me anything. And I do not know what it is they forget, and it is heavy in my hands like something stolen. I have come to the door, and I want to shout at everyone: - If you miss something, here it is! Because in all the afternoons of this life, I do not know how many doors are slammed on a face, and my soul takes something that belongs to another. Today nobody has come ; and today I have died so little in the afternoon! Translated by John Knoepfle — Robert Bly

IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE IN
I have been thinking about the man who gives in.
Have you heard about him? In this story
A twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small wind
And the pine bends all the way over to the ground.
I was persuaded," the pine says. "It was convincing."
A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agrees
To drown all her children. "What could I do?"
The cat said. "The mouse needed that."
It's strange. I've heard that some people conspire
In their own ruin. A fool says, "You don't
Deserve to live." The man says, "I'll string this rope
Over that branch, maybe you can find a box."
The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,
I need twenty thousand corpses." "Tell you what,"
The General says, "we have an extra battalion
Over there on the hill. We don't need all these men. — Robert Bly

Don't ask why the elephants wear such large shoes,
And why the kangaroos are reborn kidnappers,
And why the sailing birds are all Romantics. — Robert Bly

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed. — Robert Bly

It's good if you can accept your life - you'll notice
Your face has become deranged trying to adjust
To it. Your face thought your life would look
Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.
That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.
Even your parents can't believe how much you've
changed. — Robert Bly

The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like. — Robert Bly

What has death and a thick body dances before what has no thick body and no death. The trumpet says: "I am you." The spiritual master arrives and bows down to the beginning student. Try to live to see this! — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

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

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. — Robert Bly

The candle is not lit
To give light, but to testify to the night. — Robert Bly

READY TO SLEEP
Don't be afraid
The great lettuce of the world
Is all around us. — Robert Bly

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

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

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. — Robert Bly

They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it.
(On being named Minnesota's first Poet Laureate) — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

Contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man. — Robert Bly

I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone. — Robert Bly

We are bees then; our honey is language. — Robert Bly

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

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning. — Robert Bly

The human face shines as it speaks of things
Near itself, thoughts full of dreams.
The human face shines like a dark sky
As it speaks of those things that oppress the living — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture. — Robert Bly

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you. — Robert Bly

It is not our job to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves
Like the trees, and be born again,
Drawing up from the great roots. — Robert Bly

I am proud only of those days that pass in
undivided tenderness. — Robert Bly

Like a note of music, you are about to become nothing — Robert Bly

I want nothing from You but to see You. — Robert Bly

We make the path by walking. — Robert Bly

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

But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party. — Robert Bly

Every breath taken in by the man
Who loves, and the woman who loves,
Goes to fill the water tank
Where the spirit horses drink. — Robert Bly

Conversation With the Soul"

The soul said, "Give me something to look at."
So I gave her a farm. She said,
"It's too large." So I gave her a field.
The two of us sat down.

Sometimes I would fall in love with a lake
Or a pinecone. But I liked her
Most. She knew it.
"Keep writing," she said.

So I did. Each time the new snow fell,
We would be married again.
The holy dead sat down by our bed.
This went on for years.

"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"
What would you have said to Her? — Robert Bly

Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community. — Robert Bly

The best presenters have conversations with their audiences. — Robert Bly

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget. — Robert Bly

THE FACE IN THE TOYOTA
Suppose you see a face in a Toyota
One day, and you fall in love with that face,
And it is Her, and the world rushes by
Like dust blown down a Montana street.
And you fall upward into some deep hole,
And you can't tell God from a grain of sand.
And your life is changed, except that now you
Overlook even more than you did before;
And these ignored things come to bury you,
And you are crushed, and your parents
Can't help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota
Becomes a part of the world that you don't see.
And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,
And you stand on some mountain road weeping. — Robert Bly

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize. — Robert Bly

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken. — Robert Bly

Horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live
they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley — Robert Bly

With Pale Women in Maryland
With pale women in Maryland,
Passing the proud and tragic pastures,
And stupefied with love
And the stupendous burdens of the foreign trees,
As all before us lived, dazed
With overabundant love in the reach of the Chesapeake,
Past the tobacco warehouse, through our dark lives
Like those before, we move to the death we love
With pale women in Maryland. — Robert Bly

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. — Robert Bly

Ashes present a great diminishment away from the living tree with its huge crown and its abundant shade. The recognition of this diminishment is a proper experience for men who are over thirty. If the man doesn't experience that diminishment sharply, he will retain his inflation, and continue to identify himself with all in him that can fly: his sexual drive, his mind, his refusal to commit himself, his addiction, his transcendence, his coolness. The coolness of some American men means that they have skipped ashes. — Robert Bly