Theodore Roethke Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

2. By daily dying, I have come to be. The Collected Poems

3. DolorI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,Desolation in immaculate public places,Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. The Lost Son & Other Poems

4. 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. The Collected Poems

5. It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

6. 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 countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.

7. Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

8. What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance. The Collected Poems

9. 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,Or winding path? The edge is what I have............... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill.~From "The Waking" by