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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: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Spend
Rest
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags
Twenty
Twenties
Parts

More quotes by 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 knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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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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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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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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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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