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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Father
Absent
Home
Temperament
Children
Receive
Six
Dad
Tears
Teaching
Returns
Return
Boyfriend

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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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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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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.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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.
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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.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
Robert Bly
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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