Richard Siken Quotes
-
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.
→ -
I am singing now while Rome burns.
→ -
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?
→ -
I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
→ -
You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.
→ -
I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.
→ -
You are playing cards with three Jeffs. One is your father, one is your brother, and the other is your current boyfriend. All of them have seen you naked and heard you talking in your sleep. Your boyfriend Jeff gets up to answer the phone. To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.
→ -
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’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.
→ -
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
→ -
Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.
→ -
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.
→ -
The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.
→ -
This is my favorite part. It starts and ends here. The pebbles shine, the plan worked, Hansel Triumphant. Lesson number one: be sneaky and have a plan. But the stupid boy goes back, makes the rest of the story postscript and aftermath. He shouldn’t have gone back. And this is the second lesson I took from the story: when someone is trying to ditch you, kill you, never go back.
→ -
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.
→ -
When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.
→ -
...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.
→ -
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
→ -
If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.
→ -
Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
→ -
A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.
→ -
The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.
→ -
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
→ -
He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.
→
Related Authors
-
Tony Hoagland Poet -
William Shakespeare Poet -
Dorianne Laux Poet -
Li-Young Lee Poet -
Linda Gregg Poet -
Mary Jo Bang Poet -
Mary Renault Writer -
Terrance Hayes Poet -
Mark Strand Poet -
Jane Hirshfield Poet -
Sharon Olds Poet -
Dan Beachy-Quick Poet -
Paul Lisicky Novelist -
Louise Glück Poet -
Joan Larkin Poet -
Carolyn Forche Poet -
Dorothea Lasky Poet -
Warsan Shire Writer -
Alejandro Zambra Poet -
Sarah Kay Poet