Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Theodore Roethke

Love begets love. This torment is my joy.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

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

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I came to love, I came into my own.

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

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

The soul has many motions, body one.

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

I learn by going where I have to go.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What falls away is always. And is near.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

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.

The darkness has it's own light.

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

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

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

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

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

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

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

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.

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

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

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

Wake the happy words.

May my silences become more accurate.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

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

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

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

And I rejoiced in being what I was.

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

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

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.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

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

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

We think by feeling. What is there to know?