Quote

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

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
Wall
Scars
Somebody
Compensation
Takes
Cautious
Break
Surroundings
House
Scar
Matter
Breaks
Limp
Things
Walls
Drudgery
Men
Car
Hides

More quotes by 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
The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
Image
We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
Robert Bly
Image
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly
Image
Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
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
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
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
People tend to take stories literally these days.
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
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
Image
All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
Robert Bly
Image
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
Image
What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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
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
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly