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A mind too active is no mind at all.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Intuition
Active
Intelligence
Mind

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
Theodore Roethke
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
Theodore Roethke
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
Theodore Roethke
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
Theodore Roethke
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
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A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
Theodore Roethke
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke
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Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe.
Theodore Roethke
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The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.
Theodore Roethke
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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
Theodore Roethke
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In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
Theodore Roethke
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Theodore Roethke