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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
Theodore Roethke -
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.
Theodore Roethke
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke -
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
Theodore Roethke -
Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
Theodore Roethke -
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
Theodore Roethke -
What is desire? The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
Theodore Roethke -
When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
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I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
Theodore Roethke -
The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.
Theodore Roethke -
What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
Theodore Roethke -
The darkness has it's own light.
Theodore Roethke -
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.
Theodore Roethke -
Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.
Theodore Roethke
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
Theodore Roethke -
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke -
In a dark time, the mind begins to see.
Theodore Roethke -
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.
Theodore Roethke -
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.
Theodore Roethke -
In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.
Theodore Roethke
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The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.
Theodore Roethke -
I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
Theodore Roethke -
You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.
Theodore Roethke -
Time marks us while we are marking time.
Theodore Roethke