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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.

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
Deeper
Might
Ancient
Question
Religious
Emerge
Whether
Related
Reform
Religion
Spirituality
Nature
Forms
Form

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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!'
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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 is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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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?
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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.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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