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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.

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
Simple
Wish
Find
Much
Event
Meant
Events
Seeing

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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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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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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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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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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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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I learn by going where I have to go.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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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.
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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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.
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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.
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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