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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
Quickly
Careful
Fire
Away
Give
Giving

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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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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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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.
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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.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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.
Robert Bly
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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Robert Bly
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly