Top 80 Theodore Roethke Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Theodore Roethke

Featured in: Teaching Quotes

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

— Theodore Roethke

3. “A mind too active is no mind at all.”

— Theodore Roethke

Featured in: Intelligence Quotes

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

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

6. “Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

8. “Being, not doing, is my first joy.”

— Theodore Roethke

9. “Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

11. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

12. “The darkness has it’s own light.”

— Theodore Roethke

13. “By daily dying, I have come to be.”

— Theodore Roethke

14. “Be sure that whatever you are is you.”

— Theodore Roethke

15. “Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?”

— Theodore Roethke

16. “May my silences become more accurate.”

— Theodore Roethke

17. “The self says, I am; The heart says, I am less; The spirit says, you are Nothing.”

— Theodore Roethke

18. “I learn by going where I have to go.”

— Theodore Roethke

19. “Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.”

— Theodore Roethke

20. “In the kingdom of bang and blab.”

— Theodore Roethke

21. “I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.”

— Theodore Roethke

22. “Time marks us while we are marking time.”

— Theodore Roethke

23. “I have gone into the waste lonely places.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

25. “I came to love, I came into my own.”

— Theodore Roethke

26. “Art is our defense against hysteria and death.”

— Theodore Roethke

27. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

28. “What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I’m almost ready to begin something really new?”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

30. “The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.”

— Theodore Roethke

31. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

32. “Love begets love. This torment is my joy.”

— Theodore Roethke

33. “The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.”

— Theodore Roethke

34. “I came where the river Ran over stones; My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.”

— Theodore Roethke

35. “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 water.”

— Theodore Roethke

36. “What falls away is always. And is near.”

— Theodore Roethke

37. “Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire.”

— Theodore Roethke

38. “And what a congress of stinks!- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks, Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.”

— Theodore Roethke

39. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

40. “The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

42. “Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.”

— Theodore Roethke

43. “In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”

— Theodore Roethke

44. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

45. “God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

47. “What’s important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?”

— Theodore Roethke

48. “We think by feeling. What is there to know?”

— Theodore Roethke

49. “I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.”

— Theodore Roethke

50. “Live in a perpetual great astonishment.”

— Theodore Roethke