Quote

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

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
Write
Wells
Well
Writing
Going
Good
Poem
Anyway

More quotes by 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
The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
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
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
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
Image
A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
Image
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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
By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
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
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
Image
There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
Image
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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
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.
Robert Bly
Image
The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
Robert Bly
Image
I want nothing from You but to see You.
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
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly