Quote

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
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Miles
Distance
Adults
Large
Thousand
Elder
Almost
Adolescent
Five
Elders
True
Adult

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In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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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.'
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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.
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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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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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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.
Robert Bly
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly