Theodore Roethke Quotes
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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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.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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What is desire? The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.
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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.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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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
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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.
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The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.
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I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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The darkness has it's own light.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.
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In a dark time, the mind begins to see.
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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.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire