Quote

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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Things
Needed
Basket
Time
Full
Baskets
Half
Renunciation
Father
Adulthood
Write
Allowing
Wanted
Poetry
Writing
Accepting
Something
Instead

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
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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 want nothing from You but to see You.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
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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
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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.
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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?
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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