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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.

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
Living
Belongs
Stories
Fairy
Feel
Red
Feels
Destroy
Believe
Particularly
Adolescents
Like
Rights
Canon
World
Within
Guards
People
Age
Rewrite

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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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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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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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.
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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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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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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 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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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing
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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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