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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
Came
Start
Come
Trees
Whole
Leaves
Like
Remain
Lose
Tree
Loses

More quotes by 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.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
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.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
Robert Bly
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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.
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
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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly