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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

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
Elder
Elders
Understands
Belongs
Dead
Someone
World

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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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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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The door to the soul is unlocked you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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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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
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
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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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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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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.
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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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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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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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly