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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
Men
Prisoner
Time
Mystery
Shall
Happy
Others
Happens
Harried
Right
Probe
Thing
Prisoners

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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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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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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
Theodore Roethke
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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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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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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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