Richard Siken citations

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”