Quotes from Theodore Roethke

Now I adore my lifeWith the Bird, the abiding Leaf,With the Fish, the questing Snail,And the Eye altering all;And I dance with William BlakeFor love, for Love's sake.

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,The lovely diminutives.I could watch! I could watch!I saw the separateness of all things!

Nothing would sleep in that cellar.

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!

The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.

Tugging all day at perverse life:The indignity of it!

The sun! The sun! And all we can become And the time ripe for running to the moon!

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

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

Deep in their roots all flowers keep the light.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

May my silences become more accurate.

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

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

The darkness has it's own light.

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

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.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

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

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

I do not laugh; I do not cry; I'm sweating out the will to die. My past is sliding down the drain; I soon will be myself again.

I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

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