Quote

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

More quotes by Robert Bly

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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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All of Japan once a year will get up on their rooftops, because that's the night that the shepherd boy from one side of the Milky Way gets to meet the weaver girl on the other side of the Milky Way. They all get up on their roofs and watch that night. So they long for 365 days and then on the 365th night, they see the result of that longing.
Robert Bly
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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
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One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.
Robert Bly
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Robert Bly
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
Robert Bly
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
Robert Bly
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Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
Robert Bly
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
Robert Bly
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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
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
Robert Bly
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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.
Robert Bly
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
Robert Bly
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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
Robert Bly
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
Robert Bly