Quotes by Theodore Roethke

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

“By daily dying, I have come to be.”

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

“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.”

“What's freedom for? To know eternity.”

“What's madness but nobility of soulAt 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,O...”

“My Papa's Waltz:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanc...”

“What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.”

“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 wa...”

“The MistakeHe left his pants upon a chair:She was a widow, so she said:But he was apprehended, bare,By one who rose up from the dead.”

“I trust all joy”

“Be sure that whatever you are is you.”

“Self-contemplation is a curseThat makes an old confusion worse.”

“I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;I'm a Socrates of small fury.The waves bends with the fish. I'm taughtAs water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,I can hear light on a dry day...”

“The GeraniumWhen I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,She looked so limp and bedraggled,So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,Or a wizened aster in late September,I brought her back in ag...”

“I learn by going where I have to go”

“May my silences become more accurate.”

“When true love broke my heart in half,I took the whiskey from the shelf,And told my neighbors when to laugh.I keep a dog, and bark myself.”

“Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?”

“What grace I have is enough.”