Top 100 Theodore Roethke Quotes
#1. Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
Theodore Roethke
#4. I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
Theodore Roethke
#8. I came where the river Ran over stones; My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.
Theodore Roethke
#9. The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.
Theodore Roethke
#11. What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
Theodore Roethke
#12. From I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Theodore Roethke
#13. 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
#16. I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;
I'm a Socrates of small fury.
The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught
As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,
I can hear light on a dry day.
The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am.
Theodore Roethke
#17. I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
#21. 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
#25. Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
#26. I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
#27. I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
#28. I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.
Theodore Roethke
#30. Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
Theodore Roethke
#31. I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
Theodore Roethke
#32. She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.
Theodore Roethke
#33. What is desire?
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
Theodore Roethke
#36. Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.
Theodore Roethke
#37. I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.
Theodore Roethke
#40. What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.
Theodore Roethke
#43. Love makes me naked;
Propinquity's a harsh master;
O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!
Theodore Roethke
#45. 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
#46. It's your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.
Theodore Roethke
#47. 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
#48. The living all assemble! What's the cue?
Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
#49. I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.
Theodore Roethke
#50. From Open House
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.
Theodore Roethke
#51. Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
#55. Yet 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
#57. In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.
Theodore Roethke
#60. Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.
Theodore Roethke
#61. From The Auction
I left my home with unencumbered will
And all the rubbish of confusion sold.
Theodore Roethke
#63. A wave of Time hangs motionless on this particular shore.
I notice a tree, arsenical grey in the light, or the slow
Wheel of the stars, the Great Bear glittering colder than snow,
And remember there was something else I was hoping for.
Theodore Roethke
#64. The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke
#66. You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.
Theodore Roethke
#67. Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.
Theodore Roethke
#69. So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
#70. 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 called;The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows;And love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke
#71. When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
#72. The Mistake
He left his pants upon a chair:
She was a widow, so she said:
But he was apprehended, bare,
By one who rose up from the dead.
Theodore Roethke
#75. How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
#78. The stones were sharp,
The wind came at my back;
Walking along the highway,
Mincing like a cat.
Theodore Roethke
#81. A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
Theodore Roethke
#82. What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
Theodore Roethke
#83. And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
#84. Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
Theodore Roethke
#86. What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
Theodore Roethke
#89. Beginnings start without shade,Thinner than minnows.The live grass whirls with the sun,Feet run over the simple stones,There's time enough.Behold, in the lout's eye, love.
Theodore Roethke
#91. Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
#92. 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
#93. Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion
Theodore Roethke
#94. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
Theodore Roethke
#97. The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.
Theodore Roethke
#98. A house for wisdom, a field for revelation.
Speak to the stars, and the stars answer. At first the visible obscures:
Go where the light is.
Theodore Roethke
#100. Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.
(from "The Meadow Mouse")
Theodore Roethke
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