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

More quotes by Robert Bly

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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
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 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
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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.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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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.
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.
Robert Bly
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
Robert Bly
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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
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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
Robert Bly
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
Robert Bly
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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
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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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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly