Theodore Roethke
What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.Collection: Inspirational
Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.Collection: Nature
Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.Collection: Nature
What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.
A mind too active is no mind at all.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
Time marks us while we are marking time.
Love begets love. This torment is my joy.
The soul has many motions, body one.
A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
I came to love, I came into my own.
God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.
In a dark time, the mind begins to see.Collection: Dark
Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.Collection: Moving
May my silences become more accurate.Collection: Silence
The darkness has it's own light.Collection: Light
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.Collection: Art
How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.Collection: Doe
Live in a perpetual great astonishment.Collection: Astonishment
I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.Collection: Song
The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.Collection: Shadow
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.Collection: Fear
By daily dying, I have come to be.Collection: Philosophy
I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.Collection: Beautiful
What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?Collection: Positive
And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.Collection: Long
And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.Collection: Morning
What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?Collection: Feelings
(I measure time by how a body sways.)Collection: Body
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.Collection: Believe
A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.Collection: Teaching
To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward.Collection: Rowing
A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.Collection: Heart
But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.Collection: Sleep
What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?Collection: Book
Being, not doing, is my first joy.Collection: Joy
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, In my veins, in my bones I feel it,- The small water seeping upward, The tight grains parting at last. When sprouts break out, Slippery as fish, I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.Collection: Cutting
I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.Collection: Real
The damage of teaching: the constant contact with the undeveloped.Collection: Teaching
The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.Collection: Heart
Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustionCollection: Reality
The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.Collection: Light
Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.Collection: Men
O Lord, may I never want to look good. O Jesus, may I always read it all: out loud and the very way it should be. May I never look at the other findings until I have come to my own true conclusions: May I care for the least of the young: and become aware of the one poem that each may have written; may I be aware of what each thing is, delighted with form, and wary of the false comparison; may I never use the word "brilliant."Collection: Jesus