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
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp, as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought.

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

Theodore Roethke
Thought does not crush to stone.
The great sledge drops in vain.
Truth never is undone;
Its shafts remain.

Theodore Roethke
I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.

Theodore Roethke
At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry;
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding in wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home.
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

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
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
In a dark wood I saw—
I saw my several selves
Come running from the leaves,
Lewd, tiny, careless lives
That scuttled under stones,
Or broke, but would not go.

Theodore Roethke
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

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

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

Theodore Roethke
The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.

Theodore Roethke
Brooding on God, I may become a man.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

Theodore Roethke
I lived with deep roots once:
Have I forgotten their ways —
The gradual embrace
Of lichen around stones?

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

Theodore Roethke
To be less than you are is so easy: even a child needs no lesson in this.

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
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
I have gone into the waste lonely places
Behind the eye.

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

Theodore Roethke
To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.

Theodore Roethke