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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 learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke
What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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.
Theodore Roethke
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
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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
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
How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
Theodore Roethke
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
Theodore Roethke
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
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
What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
Theodore Roethke
Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
Theodore Roethke
Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
