Theodore Roethke Quotes

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Love is not love until love´s vulnerable.

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

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

It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I trust all joy

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?

I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet.

Self-contemplation is a curse
That makes an old confusion worse.

A wave of Time hangs motionless on this particular shore.
I notice a tree, arsenical grey in the light, or the slow
Wheel of the stars, the Great Bear glittering colder than snow,
And remember there was something else I was hoping for.

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.

from I Knew a Woman

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!

(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows.
We walk aware of what is far and close.
Here distance is familiar as a friend.
The feud we kept with space comes to an end.