Quote

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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Dying
Conditions
Waiting
Intolerable
Adolescence
Another
Ill
Place
Longing
Much
Condition
Time
Defined

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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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.
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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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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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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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.
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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How terrible the need for God.
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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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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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