Theodore Roethke Quotes - Page 3

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.

And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.

What is desire?-- The impulse to make someone else complete? That woman would set sodden straw on fire.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.

To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward.

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.

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.

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.

What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?

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.

Being, not doing, is my first joy.

O Lord, may I never want to look good. O Jesus, may I always read it all: out loud and the very way it should be. May I never look at the other findings until I have come to my own true conclusions: May I care for the least of the young: and become aware of the one poem that each may have written; may I be aware of what each thing is, delighted with form, and wary of the false comparison; may I never use the word "brilliant."

The soul has many motions, body one.

I came to love, I came into my own.

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.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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.

The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.

Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion

The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.

Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.

The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.