Quotes by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke – Straw for the Fire [selections from notebooks]
“I don’t know a thing except what I try to do.”
“If you can’t think, at least sing.”
“I feel like a pig; but there are worse ways to feel.”
“All bushes can’t be bears.”
“Who adhere to the central
Can yet be subtle.”
“My face is running away.”
“Dear God, I want it all: the depths and the heights.”
“Deliver me from myself: my journeys are all the same, father.
Ends, ends, pursue me.”
“Let instinct caper its crooked mile.”
“I’m lost in my name.”
“An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.”
“I practice at walking the void.”
“He acquired, painfully, all the pleasures of a lunatic.”
“All your ideas, put together, make a well-appointed nightmare.”
“Death blossomed in his eyes…”
“I cursed my being visible.”
“A branch like a great wishbone hanging on a wire.”
“All dark is there. The mouth that cannot speak:
The tongue wound all around a mother-root.”
“I have recovered the impulse to say someone is lovely.”
“The wind plants more than I.”
“Another woman: a change of tears.”
“To know and to love: the same thing.”
“It would seem that some kinds of emotion are a disgrace.”
“I don’t dare to be happy.”
“At forty he’s a fool who thinks he can deliver love so long denied…”
“She was wearing the flesh God promised me…”
“I am undone by love, and lose the art my mother gave me.”
“All I learned is what I love.”
“He’s one of those who kisses himself goodbye.”
“The world is where we fling it.”
“Time had no home in me.”
“Bring me, long ghost, another chance of light:
I’m waiting for the winter up my sleeve.”
“Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.”
“Use up the last light, love.”
“Few of the blind are mad.”
“Bow out, dark angel.”
“At her approach, all emptiness dissolved.”
“There’s no place else: begin from where you are.”
“I have no native shape.”
“I am by way of becoming
No more or less than I am.”
“I don’t know what I am:
I’m in love with being born.”
“My face washed in the milk of this morning.”
“I look from the stretches of dream.”
“For I have left my mind, and put on love.”
“A bird sang loud and let the moonlight in.”
“Heart, you have no house.”
“I ate the Lord, and choked.”
“The exhausting fight against inner fatigue, the soul-sickness.”
“The familiar longing to be ill.”
“I can’t be human. I haven’t the time.”
“To possess or be possessed by one’s own identity?”
“The self, the anti-self in dire embrace.”
“I spent myself in mirrors, like a whore.”
“I can become what I will,
He cried, and grew a tail.”
“In euphoria: a terrible fear that I would not live long enough to achieve the full essence of experience.”
“I seem to lose connection to what is:
I find I’m tethered to another moon …”
“Acting one’s age is just a form.”
“My own agonies, which I once thought as comic, have become more terrible with the passing of time.”
“I not only burn my candle at both ends: I send off pyrotechnical displays from my behind.”
“It’s very hard work trying to be naughty for a whole community.”
“When I go mad, I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think they’re alone.”
“I can project myself easier into a flower than a person.”
“These insects teach a man
To be anonymous.”
“I’m by all waters now.”
“If there is not another way of life, there is at least another way to life.”
“The two duties are to lament or praise.”
“The peacock and the coyote equally at home.”
“I see what I believe.”
“The notion of emptiness generates passion.”
“Love is the true surprise.”
“I envy the sun at her body.”
“I am hot for what is.
I take what I touch.”
“I am sick of women. I want God.”
“The minute rages in the clock.”
“Harvard is not enough.”
“The mirror told a dirty joke.”
“I seem to be in darkness all the time.”
“He believes too much, and he knows too much. That’s what we call mad.”
“There are brains sewn with nothing but bones.”
“I am undone by knowing what I’ve done.”
“O.K. You’re in agony: make with an agony poem.”
“I’m tired. Is that maturity?”
“I am waiting for what I am.”
“I fear I have no mind at all.”
“Something in me doesn’t want to be a poet.”
“I praise myself with howls.”
“I was not good enough for my own madness.”
“The birds are going, and their slight songs.
I am ready for a deeper silence.”
“No way back through the long arbors of the dead.”
“A desire to love myself in another world…”
“I feel sorry for the cave, said the Bear.”
“Who loved his life can love his death as well.”
“Mother of God, deliver me to me…”
“I belong to my solitude.
I shall die for myself.”
“I, in exile, forever
For that which I would acquire no long is, never existed.”
“Staggering between the madhouse and "the grave.”
“Where my lost father is: there would I be.”
“We take from nature what we cannot see.”
“I like to sit in the dark like that splintery pine growing into the rock.”
“I do not own reality, he said.
Acting as if he did.”
“I would put myself, pit myself against oblivion.”
“What I lost in a trance, my senses saved.”
“First I must look, then I must learn.”
“I have mercy in the morning.”
“My memory, my prison.”
“I am nothing but what I remember.”
“The terrible energy of the dead.”
“Many meditations destroy.”
“A love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things.”
“Reaching out more desperately for life. Training himself to love life.”
“Loveless one, in despair you shall be learned.”
“I like to think a thing part way through and feel the rest of the way.”
“He constantly was preparing himself to survive boredom.”
“The sense: I should be somewhere else. The teeth always slightly grinding.”
“Always basing my life on the intangible, the impossible.”
“I spent my life doing things I keep trying to forget.”
“The intolerable sadness that comes when we are aware at least of our own destiny.”
“The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.”
“A sick man learns from silence.”
“If we are too violent escaping one trap, we fall into another.”
“Reason, keep away from my door.”
“If I feel good, I can’t think.”
“I love my follies.”
“The dangerous notion that one’s secret wish will direct events.”
“I am at the edge of an important shadow.”
“God robbed poets of their minds that they might be made expressions of his own.”
“Are we closest to knowledge when we are farthest from the body?”
“At last there came a time when there was no longer a point in being a horse.”
“You can’t be excited about going to sleep.”
“I am hoarse from silence.”
“All my lights go dark. I fold into black stone.”
“All forms darken. Things cannot know us.”
“Teacher: a capacity for enthusiasm about the obvious.”
“Men are made by books.”
“He was a man with little capacity for any kind of thinking: therefore he was made an administrator.”
“Going to Bennington a little like going into the Marines.”
“Teacher: one who carries on his education in public.”
“I like to teach because I like to see people part of the day.”
“Through the young, I shall recover my innocence.”
“My great truth: it is possible to love the human race.”
“A philosopher is one who worries and worries about the obvious.”
“Love: looks and sounds like murder.”
“What am I, a spiritual gigolo?”
“Every man is in nirvana, if but he knows it.”
“I broke my tongue on God.”
“A rich mystic: that is what I want to be.”
“We have failed to live up to our geography.”
“Every discovery makes its own chaos.”
“A splendid day. Talked only to people.”
“They’ll be plenty of room in eternity for all of us.”
“The clock beat me again.”
“A poet: someone who is never satisfied with saying one thing at a time.”
“Poetry: a sense of the doubleness of life.”
“Poet: a constant selectivity; a refusal to elucidate with a mass of detail.”
“Literalness is the devil’s weapon.”
“A poet must be a good reporter; but he must be something a good deal more.”
“The things that concern you most can’t be put in prose. In prose the tendency is to avoid inner responsibility. Poetry is the discovery of the legend of one’s youth.”
“Basis of poetry is sensation: many poets today deny sensation, or some have no sensation: the cult of the torpid.”
“Count ideas incidental in a poem.”
“Make the language take really desperate jumps.”
“Talent talks; genius does.”
“Don’t say: create.”
“Society doesn’t create the artists; the artists create society.”
“Art is our defense against hysteria and death.”
“There are only two passions in art; there are only love and hate—with endless modifications.”
“God is one of the biggest bores in English poetry.”
“Poems that praise God must create the belief that God also believes in the writer of the poem.”
“Poem: one more triumph over chaos.”
“Remember: our deepest perceptions are a waste if we have no sense of form.”
“Puts his thoughts in motion—the poet.”
“Each word bumping along by itself.”
“Rhythm depends on expecting.”
“A musical ear is a gift from nature: but like all gifts it can be developed.”
“My design in short poems: to create the situation and the mood as quickly as possible: to etch it in and have done; but is that enough? No. There must be symbolic force, weight, or a gravity of tone.”
“Honesty: the only tricks of the real artist are technical.”
“You can’t make poetry simply by avoiding cliches.”
“Moments: beware the poetry of moments. Many of those moments are literary, remember. They have a past, a dreary past.”
“Dangers: Substituting words for thought.
The sneer is easy to master, and usually the mark of the adolescent.
Beware when you think you have found what you want.”
“Description: the landscape’s usually better for a sign of the human. But don’t lug him in like an ambulant cabbage.”
“Style: Break in on the reader sideways.
Think of the wise, talk like the common man:
Give noun a full swat,
But adjective, not.”
“Inspiration: the important thing in life it to have the right kind of frustration.”
“On small poems: a thing may be small but it need not be a cameo; it may be a cinder in the shoe or the mind’s eye or a pain in the neck.”
“Poet must first control, then dominate his medium…”
“Response to the image is not free, but controlled by the context. The incongruous response—a common fault.”
“Much to be learnt from bad poems.”
“One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.”
“Almost all language is dead metaphor.”
“The idea of poetry is itself a vast metaphor.”
“A poet is judged, in part, by the influences he resists.”
“A “movement” is a dead fashion.”
“Many famous poems are simply landmarks of bad taste.”
“Despite its effort to be surprising, so much of modern verse seems tensionless.
Sensory sharpness: lost in most.”
“Too eager to say what a lot of people will want to hear.”
“The young artist: there is no other kind of mind than my own.”
“Continual writing is really a bad form of dissipation; it drains away the marrow of the brain.”
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
“Freedom has its tyrannies—even in verse.”
“When you begin to get good, you’ll arouse the haters of life.”
“We can love ourselves and literature with equal intensity—that’s our contribution.”
“A love of poetry that passes all understanding, indeed, that requires all understanding.”
“The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.”
“I am a poet: I am always hungry.”
“Did I beat the poems to death? Did I worry the material like a mad dog?”
“The poem that is merely painful revelations: my impulse is to tell you everything—which may destroy everything.”
“There are so many ways to go to the pot as a poet; so many pitfalls, so many snares and delusions.”
“Live in a perpetual great astonishment.”
“Love poems are written by the frustrated; religious poems often by the satiated.”
“There should be a moratorium on all poems about music.”
“It’s not that most Americans can’t think; they just don’t want to.”
“May my silences become more accurate.”
“I can’t die just now. There’s too much to do.”
“Hearing poetry starts the psychological mechanism of prayer.”
“The weapons of the weak are too violent.”
“All interiors call.”
“The directionless learn only by moving.”
“Those who almost see are the most terrified.”
“I eat what I believe.”
“The Devil today takes the form of noise.”
“I am; therefore, I continue.”
“Dreaming, we awake the dead.”
“The angels ask but never answer.”
“Even a fire kisses itself.”
“Poetry is an act of mischief.”
“It is well to keep in touch with chaos.”
“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.”
“I work very slowly: I can afford to be terribly spontaneous.”
“It takes so much time to be fair.”
“How wonderful the struggle with language is.”
“Immobility is fatal in the arts.”
“If poetry can kill you, I’m like to die.”
“I notice Schweitzer lashes out at mediocrity, especially when it weakens the good.”
“An age can be judged by the quality of its failures.”
“Surely goodness and mercy can be more choosy.”
“Time goes up and down; but I go back and forth.”
“Alas, he’s degenerated into a civilized man.”
“As usual, there’s more garbage than cans.”
“I wish I had the energy to love you all.”
“The longer I live, the tireder I get of good taste.”
“With age, the pleasures of looking become more intense.”
“I pray for the death of common sense.”
“To each his own labyrinth.”
“The first sense of an abyss: reason thrown back on itself.”
“The sense of sin must die.”
“I’m sure God is bored with organized religion.”
“I have no creed: my temper is devout.”
“If God does not exist, neither do we.”
“God, alone, is poor.”
“God is all which is not me.”
“Make me evil or good, but make me something!”
“My lacks love me.”
“Words hold me in: I’m alone with what I never said.”
“Each day I’m less for death.”
“Death shall not define me.”
“This heart bursts with its buried life.”
“I am about the business of the dead.”
“All visions are of death.”
“May your feet imitate heaven.”
“I believe, even in sleep.”
“Only in language can the spirit yearn with dignity.”
“Ambition’s a species of madness.”
“Unless I’ve seen it, I don’t know.”
“Evil: good in the wrong place.”
“Death’s image has a daily resurrection.”
“The vague is more dangerous than the arid.”
“God is good: the supreme nonsense.”
“If we think long enough about God, we may create Him.”
“Does God wantall that attention?”
“We can forgive others everything but our own weaknesses.”
“All knowledge lives in paradox.”
“It’s even harder to be nice and bright than to be good and rich.”
“Flesh pays for the soul’s daring…”
“Listen to the haters: they may remind you of new ways to love.”
“We bear this life by being, being bare.”
“The body is the soul.”
“I trust all joy.”
“How dreary some else’s spiritual heroism can be.”
“About poetry we can only utter half-truths.”
“The teaching of poetry requires fanaticism.”
“Teaching needs more squirrels, more individuals, more cranks, more fanatics, (but – and this is simply what really matters – ) more brains …”
“Once a week, take a day off to be generous-minded.”
“The professor is supposed to know, I am not of that breed.”
“I like ambitious people. They’re rarely intelligent.”
“Allusive poetry: it gives those without sensibility something to do.”
“Democracy: where the semi-literate make laws and the illiterate enforce them.”
“After Richard M. Nixon, I feel that sincerity is no longer possible as a public attitude.”
“In poetry, there are no casual readers.”
“The imagist poet: runs out of objects, his eye tires.”
“I’m paid to remind you what you are.”
“Poetry-writing (the craft) can’t be taught, but it can be insinuated.”
“Not inspiration but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers.”
“The sonnet: a great form to pick your nose in.”
“The greatest assassin of life is haste.”
“Nothing seen, nothing said.”
“Energy is the soul of poetry. Explosive active language.”
“A paradox: more know what a poem is than what a line is…”
“Every sentence a cast into the dark.”
“To write poetry: you have to be prepared to die.”
“Create: then disown.”
“Remind yourself once more of the absolute holiness of your task.”