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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.

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
Like
Remain
Lose
Tree
Loses
Came
Start
Come
Trees
Whole
Leaves

More quotes by 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
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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!'
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
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.
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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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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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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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I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly