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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Use
Poems
Crafts
Friends
Language

More quotes by 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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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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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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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We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
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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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
Robert Bly
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
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If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
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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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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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
Robert Bly
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I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.
Robert Bly