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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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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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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?
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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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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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 mind too active is no mind at all.
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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 stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
Theodore Roethke
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke