Robert Bly Quotes

Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.

I had heard that when people lost people, there was anger. But I definitely experienced it a lot more than I was prepared for it. Anger was not something I'd ever really felt in my life and I was not prepared for it.

When Princess Diana died, I couldn't understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn't actually know her for real.

I want art to make me think. In order to do that, it may piss me off, or make me uncomfortable. That promotes awareness and change, or at least some discussion.

I believe films are the mirror of society we live in.

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

Once you lose somebody so close to you, you become very overprotective.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

I think you can talk about anything if the context is correctly arranged. If you set up the context and you bring the audience along carefully enough with you, you can get them to cross the line with you. What I try to do is talk about things that bother me, and I hope that in doing so I bother other people.

When a lost loved one appears before you, it's your brain that fights it, not your heart.

Artists have to show us what is not going well within the person and within the society, not try to cover it up.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget. [...] So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

That's something that I'm trying to do in my work, to send a message to western people. They're the ones who are completely disconnected.

I think the big thing would be maybe the death of my brother. That was the hardest thing for me to take. It was very tough because that's natural and he saw a certain potential and he would say, don't ever have a drink. Now, I don't carry that far with people. I never had a drink.

And I said to myself that unless you conceive Death to be a violent guerrilla and kidnaper who snatches those you love, and if you are not cowardly and cannot submit to such terrorism as civilized people now do in every department of life, you must pursue and inquire and explore every possibility and seek everywhere and try everything.

When you know that someone close to you is going to die, there's a natural tendency to want to spend as much time with them as you can.

Progressive art can assist people to learn what's at work in the society in which they live.

People who have had family members killed are able to forgive the murderer because that's the only way they can move on.

May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.

Where is your mother, Charlie asked. Dead. I’m sorry to hear that Thank you. But she was always dead.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

There are parallels between the 1960s and now, because during the 1960s, people were being slaughtered, their lives were being taken, there was violence, greed, drugs were rising - just all of this. And my uncle was saying, you've got to come back to faith, hope and love. Now, you get the translation and say faith, hope and charity - faith, hope and love.