Theodore Roethke Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.

Theodore Roethke
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.

Theodore Roethke
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.

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
Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;
They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.

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

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

Theodore Roethke
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:
Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!

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
Old men should be explorers? I'll be an Indian. Ogalala? Iroquois.

Theodore Roethke