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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
Come
Philosophical
Daily
Dying
Philosophy

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Theodore Roethke
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.
Theodore Roethke
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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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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Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
Theodore Roethke
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How terrible the need for God.
Theodore Roethke
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
Theodore Roethke
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke