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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Move
Takes
Moving
Doesn
Part
Sometimes
Like
Lazy
Depression

More quotes by Robert Bly

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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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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
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
Robert Bly
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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.
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.
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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.
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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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I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
Robert Bly
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
Robert Bly