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Quote by Robert Bly

“I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.”

Quote by Robert Bly

Author

Robert Bly, born on December 23, 1926, is a renowned American poet. His poetry is known for its profound emotion and rich imagination, which has had a profound impact on contemporary poetry. more

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“There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.”

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“Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.”

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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.'”

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“The Roman Catholic Church early on simply adapted the hierarchical structure of the Roman Empire and confused the whole thing. Vertical attention and hierarchy were so entangled, that when the French killed the king during the Revolution, they lost much of their vertical attention too.”

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“The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.”

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“If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.”

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“Adolescents are in just as much trouble in Native America as they are in the white community.”

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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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“In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.”

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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?'”

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Author:Robert Bly