Quote

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

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
Friends
Language
Use
Poems
Crafts

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
Robert Bly
Image
To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
Robert Bly
Image
What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
Image
I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
Robert Bly
Image
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
Image
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
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
The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
Robert Bly
Image
The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
Robert Bly
Image
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.
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
Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly