Richard Siken Quotes

I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.

If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

Is that too much to expect? That I would name the stars for you? That I would take you there? The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube?

You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.

You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.

I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.

I don't know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It's the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.

The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.

Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.

Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.

The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.

I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.

Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?

Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody.

Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t. You are pure at heart or you aren’t. If you are pure at heart, or lucky, you might catch a break.

Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us, only pretending to be invisible.

He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place – well then, game over.

Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.

I am singing now while Rome burns.

You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything's okay and you tell them you're just tired. And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.

I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there, either. So far, it hasn’t come up.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven...

Someone is digging your grave right now.

You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not           harmless. You are not                     breathing.

I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.

We laugh & it pits the world against us.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.

I know history. There are many names in historybut none of them are ours.

Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?

He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chestwhere a heart would fit perfectlyand he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place –well then, game over.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recentlywe have had our difficulties and there are many thingsI want to ask you.

There’s a dream in thespace between the hammer and the nail: the dream ofabout-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail willtake the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.