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.”

“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.”

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

“The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.”

“The human face shines as it speaks of thingsNear itself, thoughts full of dreams.The human face shines like a dark skyAs it speaks of those things that oppress the living”

“I have daughters and I have sons.When one of them lays a handOn my shoulder, shining fishTurn suddenly in the deep sea.”

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

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

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