Quote

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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Dare
Wings
Beats
Bird
Immeasurable
Place
Dares
Light
Stops
Live
Immense
Things
Emptiness

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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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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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.
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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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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
Theodore Roethke
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How terrible the need for God.
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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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke