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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

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
Relationship
Love
Vulnerability
Vulnerable

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
Theodore Roethke
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
Theodore Roethke
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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
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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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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
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
Theodore Roethke
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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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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
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke
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How terrible the need for God.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke