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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
Angry
Stagger
Often
Limp
Live
Sons
Men
Resentment
Drag
Invisible
Legs
Son

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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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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.
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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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.
Robert Bly
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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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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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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly