Theodore Roethke Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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

Theodore Roethke
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
O who can be
Both moth and flame? The weak moth blundering by.
Whom do we love? I thought I knew the truth;
Of grief I died, but no one knew my death.

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

Theodore Roethke
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats:
I take it and I give it back again:
For other tunes and other wanton beats
Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain.
Yes, I was dancing mad, and how
That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.

Theodore Roethke
The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape listens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.

Theodore Roethke
Bless me and the maze I'm in!
Hello, thingy spirit.

Theodore Roethke
How can I rest in the days of my slowness?
I've become a strange piece of flesh,
Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,
With a cheek soft as a hound's ear.
What's left is light as a seed;
I need an old crone's knowing.

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

Theodore Roethke
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Theodore Roethke
I'll seek my own meekness.
What grace I have is enough.
The lost have their own pace.
The stalks ask something else.
What the grave says,
The nest denies.

Theodore Roethke
When I was a lark, I sang;
When I was a worm, I devoured.

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

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

Theodore Roethke
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Theodore Roethke
Definition of a philosopher: a man who has the right to say maybe.

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

Theodore Roethke
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

Theodore Roethke
Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, —
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Theodore Roethke
There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom.

Theodore Roethke
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch

Theodore Roethke
There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.

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

Theodore Roethke
One form of the death wish is the embracing of mediocrity.

Theodore Roethke
Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.

Theodore Roethke
The night wind rises. Does my father live?
Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul.
My flesh is breathing slower than a wall.
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.

Theodore Roethke
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.

Theodore Roethke
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Theodore Roethke
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

Theodore Roethke