Theodore Roethke quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Theodore Roethke on Wise Famous Quotes.

What falls away is always. And is near.

In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.

The living all assemble! What's the cue?
Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!

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.

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.

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?

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.

I came to love, I came into my own.

What's freedom for? To know eternity.

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.

And I rejoiced in being what I was.

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.

How terrible the need for God.

Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.

What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?

Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.

My father is a fish.

O my poor words, bear with me.

The stones were sharp,
The wind came at my back;
Walking along the highway,
Mincing like a cat.

All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Maybe God has a house.
But not here.

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)

How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.

And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.

Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?

The soul has many motions, body one.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?

The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

Wake the happy words.

I fear those shadows most that start from my own feet.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
they're alone.

From The Auction
I left my home with unencumbered will
And all the rubbish of confusion sold.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

Necessity starves on the stoop of invention.

The darkness has it's own light.

What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.

Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion

In the kingdom of bang and blab.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.

To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward ...

My bones whisper to my blood; my sleep deceives me.

She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

The two duties are to lament or praise.

Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

My truths are all foreknown,This anguish self-revealed.I'm naked to the bone,With nakedness my shield.

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.

The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

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.

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.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart
of form.

The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Brooding on God, I may become a man.

You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.

What is desire?
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman would set sodden straw on fire.

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.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.

The body and the soul know how to play
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

I learn by going where I have to go

May my silences become more accurate.

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.

The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.

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

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

Love makes me naked;
Propinquity's a harsh master;
O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.

What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.

What grace I have is enough.

It's your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet.