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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
Thinking
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Ancestors
Grandmother
Fundamentally
Society
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Grandfathers
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Fathers
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Horizontal
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Sibling

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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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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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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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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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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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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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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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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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