“The professor is supposed to know. I am not of that breed.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
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Famous Theodore Roethke Quotes
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“Democracy: where the semi-literate make laws and the illiterate enforce them.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“The young artist: there is no other kind of mind but my own.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“Transcend that vision. What is first or early is easy to believe. But... it may enchain you.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“It's not that many Americans can't think: They just don't want to.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“There is no end to what should be known about words.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“More than two days in Detroit is not permitted the human psyche.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“The most difficult thing to remember: that a poem is made of words.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“We can forgive others everything but our own weaknesses.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“Once a week, take a day off to be generous-minded.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“To love objects is to love life.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“It's all I can do, he said, to hold onto life.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“I have undone myself loving the shine on stones. Must I forget the mice in the ferns? Yes.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“I'm set in one direction: toward the sun.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Selected poems
“For I believe the spiritual combat to be more desperate in the center of chaos, which is Detroit.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“My own agonies, which I once thought comic, have become more terrible with the passing of time.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
Source: Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“The poem should provide that break, that vision into reality which relieves and makes alive.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“A poetry of longing: not for escape, but for a greater reality.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“We're not going to split the heart of reality: not until the third semester.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems
“Why not hate everybody? he said. It's a good and sound philosophical position.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“Use up the last light, love.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Source: The achievement of Theodore Roethke: a comprehensive selection of his poems
“Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
“The light comes brighter from the east; the cawOf restive crows is sharper on the ear.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
“Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion”
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
“I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestowUpon that God who knows what I would know.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
“The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.”
Source: Selected poems