Long block of text in Jade textarea?

textarea(id="theTextarea")
  | Hello 
  | world.
  | Hello
  | moon.
  | Hello
  | sun.

The | worked great for me. In my case though, I needed to get the value from a js variable (passed via render local variables). This is what I ended up with:

textarea#resp( name="resp", rows="6", cols="66" )
  | #{respStr}

I hope that helps someone.