Quote

It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

Robert Bly

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Way
Wings
Grow
Grows
Right

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
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
Image
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
Image
I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
Image
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
Image
I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
Robert Bly
Image
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
Image
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
Image
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly
Image
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly
Image
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
Image
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
Image
I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
Robert Bly
Image
One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
Robert Bly
Image
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
Image
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
Robert Bly
Image
In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.
Robert Bly
Image
Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly