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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.
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
Turns
Wait
Fearful
Water
Creation
Lakes
Heart
Beyond
Flash
Subsides
Terrible
Pool
Sunlit
Silence
Forests
Abominable
Violence
Rings
Unafraid
Fire
Instant
Lake
Waiting
Burning
Forest
More quotes by Theodore Roethke
The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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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.
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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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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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.
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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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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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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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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.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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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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