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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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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.
Robert Bly
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Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
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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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
Robert Bly
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I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
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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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.
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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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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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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
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
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly