Robert Bly

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

As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.

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.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

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

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.

We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

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.

I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

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

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.

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

We did not come to remain whole._x000D_ _x000D_ We came to lose our leaves like the trees,_x000D_ _x000D_ Trees that start again.

It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.