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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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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Desire
Living
Assemble
Clumsy
Partner
Partners
Wants

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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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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.
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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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.
Theodore Roethke
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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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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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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke