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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

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
Exhausts
Dissolved
Visible
Shadow

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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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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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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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.
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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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