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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.

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
Way
Ideals
Daughter
Behavior
Rilke
Parent
Struck
Didn
Wedding
Wanted
Poem
Live
Ideal
Writing
Artistic

More quotes by Robert Bly

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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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One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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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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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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
Robert Bly
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
Robert Bly
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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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly