Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Bly
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Distance
Adults
Large
Thousand
Elder
Almost
Adolescent
Five
Elders
True
Adult
Miles

More quotes by 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 older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly
Image
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
Image
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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 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
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
Image
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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
Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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
It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
Image
The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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