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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
Japanese
Longing
Entirely
Poetry
Feel
Feels
Always

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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.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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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.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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.
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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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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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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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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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