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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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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 older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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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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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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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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One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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.
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