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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Living
Belongs
Stories
Fairy
Feel
Red
Feels
Destroy
Believe
Particularly
Adolescents
Like
Rights
Canon
World
Within
Guards
People
Age
Rewrite

More quotes by Robert Bly

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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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.
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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.
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To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.
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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
Robert Bly
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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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.
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