Robert Bly Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?'

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.

People tend to take stories literally these days.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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

My life failed on the very day I was born.

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