155 Quotes by Theodore Roethke

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?--

When true love broke my heart in half,I took the whiskey from the shelf,And told my neighbors when to laugh.I keep a dog, and bark myself.

My father is a fish.

Loved heart, what can I say?When I was a lark, I sang;When I was a worm, I devoured.The self says, I am;The heart says, I am less;The spirit says, you are nothing.

Oh, to be something else, yet still to be!

(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)

from I Knew a WomanI knew a woman, lovely in her bones,When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:The shapes a bright container can contain!

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shadeLike the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,A scent beloved of bees;Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory in one man, –A ripple widening from a single stoneWinding around the waters of the world.