Quotes from Theodore Roethke

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

What's freedom for? To know eternity.

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

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

What grace I have is enough.

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

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

How terrible the need for God.

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

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

I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.

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

I learn by going where I have to go

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

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

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

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

In a dark time, the mind begins to see.

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.