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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: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Spend
Rest
Lives
Ourself
Trying
Deciding
Life
Bags
Twenty
Twenties
Parts

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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture that is why suburban children want rap music.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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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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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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In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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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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