Theodore Roethke Quotes

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

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.

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.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

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

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

May my silences become more accurate.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

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

I have gone into the waste lonely places

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

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

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

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

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

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water. I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.

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.

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

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

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

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

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.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

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

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

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.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me, so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

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

I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another. With bats, weasels, worms...I rejoice in the kinship. Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin.

How terrible the need for God.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

By daily dying, I have come to be.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

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.

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

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