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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
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Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
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More quotes by Robert Bly

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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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 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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly