Quote

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
Believe
Particularly
Adolescents
Like
Rights
Canon
World
Within
Guards
People
Age
Rewrite
Living
Belongs
Stories
Fairy
Feel
Red
Feels
Destroy

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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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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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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.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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.
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Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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.
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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 sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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