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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.

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
Three
Criminals
Form
Despair
Music
Entire
Children
Beginning
Men
System
Suburban
Justice
Resonate
Culture
Criminal
Black
Rap

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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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I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.
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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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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
Robert Bly
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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 part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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 best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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