Bly

“I want nothing from You but to see You.”
― Robert Bly, Morning Poems

“Wherever there is water there is someone drowning.”
― Robert Bly, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems

“What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“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.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men

“A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.”
― Robert Bly, Morning Poems

“Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.”
― Robert Bly, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems

“I know men who are healthier at fifty than they've ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.”
― Robert Bly