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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
Literally
Tend
Days
Stories
Take
People

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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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