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Time marks us while we are marking time.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Marking
Marks
Suicide
Mark
Death
Time

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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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.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
Theodore Roethke
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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
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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
Theodore Roethke
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
Theodore Roethke
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
Theodore Roethke
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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
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Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke