Quotes from Richard Siken

Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other's knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there.

O how he loves you, darling boy. Oh how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night.

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

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grain of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.

What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.

There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you.

Bird 1: This is the wrong story. Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.

The enormity of my desire disgusts me.

It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

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.

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

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.

There's a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever.

When you paint an evil thing, do you invoke it or take away its power?

You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.

If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other.

God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

Verse. Chorus. Verse. I'm sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable. 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.

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty. I stood in the road looking forward and back, to see if it would change something. After a while, I went back inside and tripped over the box.

I'll give you my heart to make a place for it to happen, evidence of a love that transcends hunger. 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?

Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?