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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.

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
Always
Japanese
Longing
Entirely
Poetry
Feel
Feels

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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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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
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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.
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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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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.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
Robert Bly
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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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.'
Robert Bly
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
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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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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?'
Robert Bly
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly