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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.

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
Soul
Rising
Deeply
Tragedy
Sweet
Higher
Sinks
Goes
Drowning
Water
Waters
Spirit
Melancholy

More quotes by Robert Bly

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The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.
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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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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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 sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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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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