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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

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
Way
Wings
Grow
Grows
Right

More quotes by 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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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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.
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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I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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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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 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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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.
Robert Bly
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
Robert Bly
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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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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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly