Best 103 quotes of Theodore Roethke on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

A mind too active is no mind at all.

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

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.

And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

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

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.

A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.

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.

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.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

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

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.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

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

How terrible the need for God.

I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

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

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.

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water. I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.

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.

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.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

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

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.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

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.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me, so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

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.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

May my silences become more accurate.

My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

My truths are all foreknown,This anguish self-revealed.I'm naked to the bone,With nakedness my shield.

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

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.

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

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

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

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