Quote

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.

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
Regard
Owl
Ones
Siblings
Call
Whales
Young
Sibling
Great
Ecological
Years
Advance
Naturally
Tend
Owls

More quotes by Robert Bly

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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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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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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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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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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.
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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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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
Robert Bly
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
Robert Bly