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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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Robert Bly
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Rest
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags
Twenty
Twenties
Parts
Spend

More quotes by 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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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.'
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
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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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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
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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.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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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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One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
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