Theodore Roethke - The Far Field

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Theodore Roethke Quotes
God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Theodore Roethke
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

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

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

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
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
my shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
that place among the rocks —
is it a cave, or winding path?
The edge is what I have.

Theodore Roethke