Theodore Roethke Quotes

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

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.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.

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

May my silences become more accurate.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

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

But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

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.

How terrible the need for God.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?

In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.

Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.

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

I learn by going where I have to go.

And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.

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

Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.

The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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

The darkness has it's own light.