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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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
Quickly
Careful
Fire
Away
Give
Giving

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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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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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The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing
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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.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly