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The older I get, the more beauty I see in the word renunciation.

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
Renunciation
Older
Beauty
Word

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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.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
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What I am trying to do is bring people into grief in relation to the society we have.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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Male initiation does not move toward machoism on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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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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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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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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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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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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Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'
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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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