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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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
Even
Breathing
Would
Breath
Life
Breaths
Keeps
Small
Give
Nothing
Giving
Dirt
More quotes by Theodore Roethke
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
The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke
Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
Theodore Roethke
The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
How terrible the need for God.
Theodore Roethke
By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
Theodore Roethke
Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
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
I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
Time marks us while we are marking time.
Theodore Roethke
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Theodore Roethke
