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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
Writing
Going
Good
Poem
Anyway
Write
Wells
Well

More quotes by 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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
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In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
Robert Bly
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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.
Robert Bly
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We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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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The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.
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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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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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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