Top 100 Roethke Quotes
#1. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#2. Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
Krist Novoselic
#3. Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
Theodore Roethke
#6. 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
#10. 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
#11. The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.
Theodore Roethke
#13. What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
Theodore Roethke
#14. 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
#15. 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
#20. When true love broke my heart in half,
I took the whiskey from the shelf,
And told my neighbors when to laugh.
I keep a dog, and bark myself.
Theodore Roethke
#21. My truths are all foreknown,This anguish self-revealed.I'm naked to the bone,With nakedness my shield.
Theodore Roethke
#22. 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
#23. I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke
#27. 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
#31. Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
#32. I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke
#33. I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
Theodore Roethke
#34. I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.
Theodore Roethke
#35. To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward ...
Theodore Roethke
#37. Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
Theodore Roethke
#38. 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
#39. She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.
Theodore Roethke
#40. What is desire?
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
Theodore Roethke
#43. Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.
Theodore Roethke
#44. 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
#47. I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
Theodore Roethke
#48. What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.
Theodore Roethke
#51. Love makes me naked;
Propinquity's a harsh master;
O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!
Theodore Roethke
#53. 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
#54. It's your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.
Theodore Roethke
#55. 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
#56. The living all assemble! What's the cue?
Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
Theodore Roethke
#57. I do not laugh; I do not cry;
I'm sweating out the will to die.
My past is sliding down the drain;
I soon will be myself again.
Theodore Roethke
#58. I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.
Theodore Roethke
#59. 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
#60. Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
#64. 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
#66. In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.
Theodore Roethke
#69. Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.
Theodore Roethke
#70. From The Auction
I left my home with unencumbered will
And all the rubbish of confusion sold.
Theodore Roethke
#72. The body and the soul know how to play
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
Theodore Roethke
#73. 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
#74. The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke
#76. You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.
Theodore Roethke
#77. Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.
Theodore Roethke
#79. So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
#80. 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
#82. When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
#83. 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
#84. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
#87. How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
#90. The stones were sharp,
The wind came at my back;
Walking along the highway,
Mincing like a cat.
Theodore Roethke
#93. A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
Theodore Roethke
#94. What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
Theodore Roethke
#95. And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.
Theodore Roethke
#96. Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
Theodore Roethke
#98. 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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