Richard Siken Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.”

“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.”

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

“Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.”

“You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet.”

“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.”

“we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty”

“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.”

“We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me
spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls
right out of my mouth.
You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.”

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you saybut you never come through.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“Here I am
leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome
burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,
my silent night, just mash your lips against me.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”

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

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

“We laugh & it pits the world against us.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”

“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”

“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?”

“You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.
                 You wanted to be in love
                             and he happened to get in the way.”

“I am singing now while Rome
burns.”

“You're waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we are in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn't make sense.”

“Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m taking to you and you know it.”

“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.”

“We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor…
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.”

“Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.”

“There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.”

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

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

“Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.”

“Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.”

“You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.”

“You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.
I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.
You weren't supposed to.”

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”