Quote

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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Matter
Breaks
Limp
Things
Walls
Drudgery
Men
Car
Hides
Wall
Scars
Somebody
Compensation
Takes
Cautious
Break
Surroundings
House
Scar

More quotes by 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.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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.
Robert Bly
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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.
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.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly
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One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
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.
Robert Bly
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Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Robert Bly
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
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