Theodore Roethke Quotations

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

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

Time marks us while we are marking time.

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

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

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

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

I learn by going where I have to go.

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I came to love, I came into my own.

Let others probe the mystery if they can/ Time harried prisoners of shall and will./ The right thing happens to the happy man.

What shakes the eye but the invisible? Running from God's the longest race of all

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

The soul has many motions, body one.

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

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.

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.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

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

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

And I rejoiced in being what I was.

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

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.

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Wake the happy words.

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

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

The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.

Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.

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

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

The body and the soul know how to play In that dark world where gods have lost their way.

Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!

What is desire?-- The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

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

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.

The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.

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.

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

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.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

In the kingdom of bang and blab.

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

What falls away is always. And is near.

The darkness has it's own light.

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.

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

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

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

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.

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

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

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

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

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

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 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.

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

By daily dying, I have come to be.

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

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

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

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.

How terrible the need for God.

May my silences become more accurate.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

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.

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

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.

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

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

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

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

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.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on