Quotes from Richard Siken

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'd like to see poetry become as integral and common to life as music is. It would be nice to be able to enjoy a poem for a while—like a summer hit on the radio—in addition to enjoying a poem as an important, lasting work. I'd like to see poetry treated more like television. I admit, it sounds odd, but I'd love to see it understood as something available and enjoyable. It is. We should.

Together we trace out the/trail away from doom. There isn't hope, there is a trail.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.

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.

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

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

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.

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.