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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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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
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Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
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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 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 could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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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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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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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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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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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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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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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