Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Theodore Roethke - Page 2

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.

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

Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.

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

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

In the kingdom of bang and blab.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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