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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.

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
Men
Descend
Tragedies
Insist
Depths
Depth
Tragedy
Call
Certain

More quotes by Robert Bly

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We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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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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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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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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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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
Robert Bly
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly