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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
Whole
Leaves
Like
Remain
Lose
Tree
Loses
Came
Start
Come
Trees

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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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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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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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
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Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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