Quote

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

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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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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.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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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.
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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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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All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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