Robert Bly Quotes

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

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

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

People tend to take stories literally these days.

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

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

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.

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

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.

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

My life failed on the very day I was born.

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

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.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

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

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

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

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.

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

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.

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

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have daughters and I have sons.When one of them lays a handOn my shoulder, shining fishTurn suddenly in the deep sea.

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.

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.

The human face shines as it speaks of thingsNear itself, thoughts full of dreams.The human face shines like a dark skyAs it speaks of those things that oppress the living