Quote

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

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
Twenty
Twenties
Parts
Spend
Rest
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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
Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly
Image
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?'
Robert Bly
Image
The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
Robert Bly
Image
A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
Image
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
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
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
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.
Robert Bly
Image
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
Robert Bly
Image
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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
What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
Robert Bly
Image
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.
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