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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
Twenty
Twenties
Parts
Spend
Rest
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags

More quotes by Robert Bly

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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
Robert Bly
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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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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.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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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
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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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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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.
Robert Bly