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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
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Thinking
Phrases
Ancestors
Grandmother
Fundamentally
Society
Ancestor
Use
Phrase
Culture
Suggest
Grandfathers
Father
Fathers
Grandmothers
Mother
Grandfather
Horizontal
Without
Mothers
Sibling

More quotes by Robert Bly

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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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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
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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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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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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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