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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Wells
Well
Writing
Going
Good
Poem
Anyway
Write

More quotes by Robert Bly

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I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
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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.
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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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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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.
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
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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!'
Robert Bly
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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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Adolescents believe that the world belongs to the living, or more particularly to living people their age, so they feel within their rights if they destroy the canon or rewrite the fairy stories or act like Red Guards.
Robert Bly