Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Bly - Page 2

All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.

Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.

All of those on the left, as I am, have always vastly preferred the democratic society over the hierarchical society and still do, but the democratic culture doesn't exist without highly informed citizens capable of thinking well, and if you have schools in which 40 percent of the people coming out of them cannot make change for a dollar, you don't have a democracy. You have a sibling society.

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.

Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.

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

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.

Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.

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

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

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.

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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

We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

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

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

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

The Roman Catholic Church early on simply adapted the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire and confused the whole thing. Vertical attention and hierarchy were so entangled, that when the French killed the king during the Revolution, they lost much of their vertical attention too.

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

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

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

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

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

In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.

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

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.

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

Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community.

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.

I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.

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 ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made.

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

Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison; they turn to poetry.

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

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

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.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

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

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

People tend to take stories literally these days.

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

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.

If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.

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.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

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.

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