Quote

Poetry keeps longing alive.

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
Poetry
Alive
Longing
Keeps

More quotes by Robert Bly

Image
I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
Image
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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
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
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
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
Image
In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
Robert Bly
Image
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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
The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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 deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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
People tend to take stories literally these days.
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
I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
Robert Bly