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We think by feeling. What is there to know?

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
Emotion
Feeling
Knowledge
Feelings
Think
Thinking

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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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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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.
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 visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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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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Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe.
Theodore Roethke
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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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I came to love, I came into my own.
Theodore Roethke
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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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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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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