Theodore Roethke Quotes

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Be sure that whatever you are is you.

May my silences become more accurate.

The darkness has it's own light.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.

I learn by going where I have to go.

And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.