Richard Siken quotes

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. (Richard Siken)

We laugh & it pits the world against us.

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

I am singing now while Rome
burns. (Richard Siken)

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

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. (Richard Siken)

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Richard Siken

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

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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.

Richard Siken

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Richard Siken

Quotes count: 38