Robert Bly Quotes

Young men are obsessed with their dads, and they remain obsessed if the dad is not around. Remember that there was a lot of discussion about how George W. Bush might have invaded Iraq to atone for the failures of his dad.

I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.

Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents' childhoods?

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

I can't do what my mother did, which is tell me every single day of my life about her labor and how long it was and how it was 36 hours of hell .

Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

The fundamental human truth underpinning 'Ox Mountain Death Song' is that men so very often turn into their fathers. The way that everything gets passed down.

Because I once became so distraught watching the film 'Watership Down,' my parents were happier to let me watch action adventures featuring humans and warriors rather than cute animals.

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.

I'm estranged from my father and that relationship, as a young man, is incredibly important. It's probably responsible for the man I've become.

Many great stories are father issues, mother issues or death.

I have daddy issues. So I keep tissues on me at all times.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.

I always thought of myself as inadequate. Kids of divorced parents always feel that way - that, on some subconscious level, they're responsible.

Losing a part of a breast or all of one or both has, obviously, serious psychological consequences.

When I started writing 'My Struggle,' my father was still an issue: someone I had in me every day, someone I would dream about - he was still a part of me. He was such a huge figure for me, and now he is just one among many, and that feels like a relief.

Everything a parent chooses to do in their life will forever haunt their kids.

It's not good to lose your dad at any time but at 13 years of age you are just going through puberty and growing up and that was a very crucial time and was a hard time to lose my dad and it had a big effect on me.

So many men have holes in their souls the shape of their fathers. You can pass that on to your kid, or you can do something about it, and I'm seeing a lot of men doing something about it.

I don't think it's healthy to have secrets; they hang over a family for generations.

My dad was a serious alcoholic, and ultimately, that's why he died. When you're a child of someone who struggled with things like that, you look for the common thread. Is there a pattern? Is there an inheritance of pathology in some way? That haunts me.