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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.

Robert Bly

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Robert Bly
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags
Twenty
Twenties
Parts
Spend
Rest

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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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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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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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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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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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.
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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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I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
Robert Bly
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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.'
Robert Bly