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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
World
Elder
Elders
Understands
Belongs
Dead
Someone

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I want nothing from You but to see You.
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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.
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There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
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We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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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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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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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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.
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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