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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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Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Without
Mothers
Sibling
Thinking
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Ancestors
Grandmother
Fundamentally
Society
Ancestor
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Grandfathers
Father
Fathers
Grandmothers
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Grandfather
Horizontal

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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
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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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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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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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