Top 80 Theodore Roethke Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line.”

— Theodore Roethke

52. “All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.”

— Theodore Roethke

53. “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.”

— Theodore Roethke

54. “I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.”

— Theodore Roethke

55. “Wake the happy words.”

— Theodore Roethke

56. “What’s freedom for? To know eternity.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

58. “The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.”

— Theodore Roethke

59. “And I rejoiced in being what I was.”

— Theodore Roethke

60. “You must believe a poem is a holy thing, a good poem, that is.”

— Theodore Roethke

61. “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

62. “Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.”

— Theodore Roethke

63. “To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward...”

— Theodore Roethke

64. “The soul has many motions, body one.”

— Theodore Roethke

65. “A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.”

— Theodore Roethke

66. “How terrible the need for God.”

— Theodore Roethke

67. “I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.”

— Theodore Roethke

68. “Teach as an old fishing guide takes out a beginner.”

— Theodore Roethke

69. “Civilization is over-rated, but there isn’t much else.”

— Theodore Roethke

70. “And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning.”

— Theodore Roethke

71. “In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.”

— Theodore Roethke

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

— Theodore Roethke

73. “Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.”

— Theodore Roethke

74. “Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.”

— Theodore Roethke

75. “She loved the wind because the wind loved me.”

— Theodore Roethke

76. “Brooding on God, I may become a man.”

— Theodore Roethke

77. “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”

— Theodore Roethke

78. “I fear those shadows most that start from my own feet.”

— Theodore Roethke

79. “Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!”

— Theodore Roethke

80. “Who sighs from far away?”

— Theodore Roethke

81. “What grace I have is enough.”

— Theodore Roethke

82. “O my poor words, bear with me.”

— Theodore Roethke

83. “Necessity starves on the stoop of invention.”

— Theodore Roethke

84. “Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out all I could of all desire;.”

— Theodore Roethke

85. “Am I reduced to the indignity of examples?”

— Theodore Roethke

86. “A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.”

— Theodore Roethke