Robert Bly Quotations

Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.

My life failed on the very day I was born.

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

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

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.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.