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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?

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
Guts
Importance
Books
Book
Important

More quotes by 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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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
Theodore Roethke
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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
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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
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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