Theodore Roethke Quotes
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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I measure time by how a body sways.
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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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A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
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Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion
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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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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.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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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.
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God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.
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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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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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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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May my silences become more accurate.
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How terrible the need for God.
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The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.
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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'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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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.
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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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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.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.