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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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I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
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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.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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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.
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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.
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly