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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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Others
Happens
Harried
Right
Probe
Thing
Prisoners
Men
Prisoner
Time
Mystery
Shall
Happy

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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I have gone into the waste lonely places
Theodore Roethke
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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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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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke
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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
Theodore Roethke
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Theodore Roethke
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
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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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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
Theodore Roethke
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
Theodore Roethke