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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
Fire
Away
Give
Giving
Quickly
Careful

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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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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.
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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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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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.
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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.
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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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All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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?'
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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