Quotes by Robert Bly

About Robert Bly:

Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement, which spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Robert Bly

Finding the Father My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing– as the ocean carries logs. So on some days the body wails with its great energy; it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on ...

Robert Bly

It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep. The gray light as you pour gleaming water-- It seems you've traveled years to get here. Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve It, have it; no on...

Robert Bly

It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice Your face has become deranged trying to adjust To it. Your face thought your life would look Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten. That was a clear river touched by mountain wind. Even y...

Robert Bly

The human face shines as it speaks of things Near itself, thoughts full of dreams. The human face shines like a dark sky As it speaks of those things that oppress the living

Robert Bly

We have never understood how birds manage to fly, Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams, Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

Robert Bly

Don't ask why the elephants wear such large shoes, And why the kangaroos are reborn kidnappers, And why the sailing birds are all Romantics.

Robert Bly

It's all right if people think we are idiots. It's all right if we lie face down on the earth. It's all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

Robert Bly

It is not our job to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves Like the trees, and be born again, Drawing up from the great roots.

Robert Bly

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

Robert Bly

I have daughters and I have sons. When one of them lays a hand On my shoulder, shining fish Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

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

Robert Bly

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

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Robert Bly

Author Bio

  • NameRobert Bly
  • DescriptionAmerican poet, author and activist
  • BornDecember 23, 1926
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionLinguist; Poet; Translator; Writer
  • WorksIron John: A Book About Men
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; ; National Book Award