Quotes By Author: Theodore Roethke

“It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes; let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.”

“What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“By daily dying, I have come to be.”

“Is there a wisdom in objects? Few objects praise the Lord.”

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”