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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

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
Anymore
Spend
Couldn
Poetry
Wanted
Children
Writing
Time

More quotes by Robert Bly

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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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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I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
Robert Bly
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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?
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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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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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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
Robert Bly
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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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.
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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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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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
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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