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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.

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
Giving
Quickly
Careful
Fire
Away
Give

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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.
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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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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I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.
Robert Bly
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Robert Bly
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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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