Quotes from Richard Siken

This is a story of loops, at least one. I stepped off the loop. I spent time listening, testing realms. I snapped a twig in my head and struck out. You know what it's like to be alone: gimlets and vermicide. You know what it's like to be alive, so forgiveness.

Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem.

Can we love nature for what it really is: predatory? We do not walk through a passive landscape. The paint dries eventually. We collide with place, which is another name for God, and limp away with a permanent injury. Ask for a blessing? You can try, but we will not remain unscathed.

The hunter sinks his arrows into the trees and then paints the targets around them. The trees imagine they are deer. The deer imagine they are safe. The arrows: they have no imagination.

But truth doesn't count / in law, only proof.

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

I kept my mind on the moon.

There are so many things I'm not allowed to tell you.

Oh, the body—its hungers, needs, and limitations. You look at somebody and you realize that they're in there, inside there, somewhere, and how will you ever reach them, understand them?

You could love this boy with all your heart.

he knows you, and he's talking to you, but you're in pain and you cannot understand him.

There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with.

Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

Lie down on the bed, you're all I ever wanted and worth dying for too... but I think I'd rather keep the bullet.

Numbers larger than ten are no longer human: they fly from the hand into the imaginary sky we call hypothesis.

You wonder what he's thinking when he shivers like that.

Love, for you is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's terrifying.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?

I like dead things, says the landscape. They cannot hurt me.

The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, so what's there to be faithful to? I am faithful to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it.

They are the same and they are not the same. They are the same and they hate each other for it.

He knows that when you snap a mast it's time to get a set of oars or learn how to breathe underwater. Rely on one thing too long and when it disappears and you have nothing–well, that's just bad planning. It's embarrassing, to think it could never happen. It happens.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.