Theodore Roethke Quotes
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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.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
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I measure time by how a body sways.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion
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May my silences become more accurate.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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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.
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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.
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The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
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Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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.
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How terrible the need for God.
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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.
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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.
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My truths are all foreknown,This anguish self-revealed.I'm naked to the bone,With nakedness my shield.
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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.