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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
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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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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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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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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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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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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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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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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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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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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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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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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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