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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?

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
Guts
Importance
Books
Book
Important

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
Theodore Roethke
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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
Theodore Roethke
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
Theodore Roethke
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
Theodore Roethke
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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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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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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
Theodore Roethke
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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.
Theodore Roethke
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
Theodore Roethke
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
Theodore Roethke
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke