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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
Wanted
Poem
Live
Ideal
Writing
Artistic
Way
Ideals
Daughter
Behavior
Rilke
Parent
Struck
Didn
Wedding
More quotes by Robert Bly
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
Robert Bly
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
Robert Bly
If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
Robert Bly
I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
Robert Bly
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
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
Robert Bly
The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
Robert Bly
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
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly
I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
Robert Bly
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
In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
Robert Bly
Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
People tend to take stories literally these days.
Robert Bly