Quote

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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Death
Rain
Hollows
Hands
Moved
Blossoms
Dream
Flower
Leaned
Stills
Toward
Cave
Still
Lived
Dove
Love
Hair
Sang
Called
Caves
Simple
Flowers
Sweetened

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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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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A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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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.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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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.
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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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.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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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
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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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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke