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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.

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
Hope
Exactly
Forgetting
Helping
Toward
Retirement
Next
Lies
Drawn
Going
Line
Pull
Years
Stay
Turning
Lines
Mysterious
Forget
Ground
Adolescents
Lying
Adults
Adulthood

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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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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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 you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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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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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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Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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.
Robert Bly
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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.
Robert Bly