Theodore Roethke Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.

Theodore Roethke
A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;
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
Tugging all day at perverse life:
The indignity of it!

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

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 the worst portion in this mortal life? A pensive mistress, and a yelping wife.

Theodore Roethke
Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day: From me to Thee's a long and terrible way.

Theodore Roethke
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.

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

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

Theodore Roethke
The moon draws back its waters from the shore.
By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan,
And she is what I would. In this light air,
Lost opposites bend down —
Sing of that nothing of which all is made,
Or listen into silence, like a god.

Theodore Roethke
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

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

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

Theodore Roethke
The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

Theodore Roethke
Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will —
The right thing happens to the happy man.

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
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

Theodore Roethke
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolour of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places.

Theodore Roethke
One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre.

Theodore Roethke
And I dance with William Blake
For love, for Love's sake; And everything comes to One,
As we dance on, dance on, dance on.

Theodore Roethke
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil, The lovely diminutives. I could watch! I could watch! I saw the separateness of all things!

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