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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: 97
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

More quotes by Robert Bly

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The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.
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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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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
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The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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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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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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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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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