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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.

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
Boundaries
Tend
Siblings
War
Sibling
Others
Border
Care
Unlikely
Much
Worn
Shirts
Borders

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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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We know that the adult in a certain sense has an attitude toward life exactly opposite to the attitude of commercials. Commercials say, 'Your longing for 3.2 beer is very important. Your longing for skin that doesn't have any wrinkles in it, that's very, very, very important.' The adult says, 'No, I've got wrinkles, so what?'
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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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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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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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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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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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
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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.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
Robert Bly
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
Robert Bly