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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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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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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Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
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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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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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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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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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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A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly