Robert Bly Quotes - Page 3

As a parent you have to do some renunciation.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it; the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Poetry keeps longing alive.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.