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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
Robert Bly
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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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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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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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
Robert Bly
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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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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
Robert Bly
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
Robert Bly
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
Robert Bly
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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly
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If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
Robert Bly