Quotes from 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn't. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don't, they'll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. 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.

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

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

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

All night I streched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone ''Please keep him safe. Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces.'' Makes a cathedral, him pressing against me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because it's all I have, because I'm hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I'll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me 'cause I couldn't make you love me and I'm tired of pulling your teeth.