Quote

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.

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
Woman
Breath
Spirit
Breaths
Every
Loves
Men
Horse
Drink
Tank
Goes
Tanks
Taken
Horses
Water
Fill

More quotes by Robert Bly

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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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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.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
Robert Bly
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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 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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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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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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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 have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly