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
Things
Walls
Drudgery
Men
Car
Hides
Wall
Scars
Somebody
Compensation
Takes
Cautious
Break
Surroundings
House
Scar
Matter
Breaks
Limp

More quotes by Robert Bly

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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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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.
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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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.'
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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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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To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
Robert Bly
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
Robert Bly
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I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.
Robert Bly