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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

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
Tell
Everything
Sociological
Prose
Grief
Point

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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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
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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.
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All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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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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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly