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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.

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
Renunciation
Older
Beauty
Word

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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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 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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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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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