Theodore Roethke quotes - page 2

All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure. (Theodore Roethke)
Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will - The right thing happens to the happy man.
Theodore Roethke
My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise.
Theodore Roethke
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!
Theodore Roethke
The moon draws back its waters from the shore. By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan, And she is what I would. In this light air, Lost opposites bend down - Sing of that nothing of which all is made, Or listen into silence, like a god.
Theodore Roethke
Bless me and the maze I'm in! Hello, thingy spirit.
Theodore Roethke
There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.
Theodore Roethke
Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
Theodore Roethke
There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge - as opposed to wisdom.
Theodore Roethke
Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out what I could of all desire; I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone. Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone.
Theodore Roethke
The night wind rises. Does my father live? Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul. My flesh is breathing slower than a wall. Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love. (Theodore Roethke)
I'll seek my own meekness. What grace I have is enough. The lost have their own pace. The stalks ask something else. What the grave says, The nest denies.
Theodore Roethke
By daily dying, I have come to be.
Theodore Roethke
How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
Theodore Roethke
Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird Further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back.
Theodore Roethke
At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells.
Theodore Roethke
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
Theodore Roethke
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
Theodore Roethke
What falls away is always. And is near. (Theodore Roethke)
I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
Theodore Roethke
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch.
Theodore Roethke
I take this cadence from a man named Yeats: I take it and I give it back again: For other tunes and other wanton beats Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. Yes, I was dancing mad, and how That came to be the bears and Yeats would know.
Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.
Theodore Roethke