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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
Achieve
Cultivated
Dies
Achieving
Moving
Moves
Doe
Male
Heart
Males
Contrary
Toward
Move
Initiation

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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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A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
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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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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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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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.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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.
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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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I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
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Poetry keeps longing alive.
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Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
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What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.
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The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.
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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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Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.
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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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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.
Robert Bly