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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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Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Robert Bly
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
Robert Bly
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In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.
Robert Bly
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The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.
Robert Bly
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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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One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
Robert Bly
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If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
Robert Bly
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Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
Robert Bly
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly