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People tend to take stories literally these days.

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
Tend
Days
Stories
Take
People
Literally

More quotes by Robert Bly

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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.
Robert Bly
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A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
Robert Bly
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
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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
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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly