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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

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
Human
Scales
Humans
Easily
Journeys
Take
Wings
Overlooked
Long
Poetry
Remaining
Like
Journey
Bees
World
Place
Wing
May
Poems
Best
Scale

More quotes by 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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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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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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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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
Robert Bly
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A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Robert Bly
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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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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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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Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
Robert Bly