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By daily dying, I have come to be.

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
Philosophical
Daily
Dying
Philosophy
Come

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
Theodore Roethke
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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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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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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
Theodore Roethke
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
Theodore Roethke
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
Theodore Roethke
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
Theodore Roethke
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke
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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke