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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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It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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 sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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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By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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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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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
Robert Bly