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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

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Robert Bly
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Dies
Achieving
Moving
Moves
Doe
Male
Heart
Males
Contrary
Toward
Move
Initiation
Achieve
Cultivated

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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
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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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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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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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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
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In the sibling society, both the adult and the elder get lost, and no one knows where they are.
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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
Robert Bly
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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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