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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Often
Limp
Live
Sons
Men
Resentment
Drag
Invisible
Legs
Son
Angry
Stagger

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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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By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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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 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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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