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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.
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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Thousand
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Adolescent
Five
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True
Adult
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Adults
More quotes by Robert Bly
Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
Robert Bly
The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison they turn to poetry.
Robert Bly
What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
Robert Bly
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
Robert Bly
An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
Robert Bly
What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
Robert Bly
I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
Robert Bly
I want nothing from You but to see You.
Robert Bly
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.
Robert Bly
I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
Robert Bly
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?'
Robert Bly