Stanton Hager

“Initiation asks the son to move his love energy away from the attractive mother to the relatively unattractive serpent father. All that is ashes work. When a man enters this stage he regards Descent as a holy thing, he increases his tolerance for ashes, eats dust as snake do, increases his stomach for terrifying insights, deepens his ability to digest the evil facts of history, accepts the job of working seven years under the ground, leaves the granary at will through the rat’s hole, bites on cinders, learns to shudder, and follows the voice of the old mole below the ground.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: The Bestselling Classic on Modern Masculinity And Self-Discovery

“Incompetence will show in the use of too many words. The reader's first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance.”
― Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

“I resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living,
that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry
was "indestructible," what part could not be lost by translation and—scarcely less
important—what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly
incapable of being translated.”
― Ezra Pound, Collected Early Poems

“the quality of a true warrior is that he is in service to a purpose greater than himself: that is, to a transcendent cause.”
― Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men