Theodore Roethke Quotes

To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward.

May my silences become more accurate.

I learn by going where I have to go.

The soul has many motions, body one.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

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........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

The darkness has it's own light.

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

How terrible the need for God.

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

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

You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

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

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.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

O Lord, may I never want to look good. O Jesus, may I always read it all: out loud and the very way it should be. May I never look at the other findings until I have come to my own true conclusions: May I care for the least of the young: and become aware of the one poem that each may have written; may I be aware of what each thing is, delighted with form, and wary of the false comparison; may I never use the word "brilliant."

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

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

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

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

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