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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Robert Bly

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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Emptiness
Horror
Beginning
Love

More quotes by Robert Bly

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To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
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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.
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One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
Robert Bly
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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
Robert Bly
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly
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If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
Robert Bly
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
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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
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Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
Robert Bly