Top 180 Richard Siken Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

3. “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?”

— Richard Siken

4. “Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”

— Richard Siken

5. “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.”

— Richard Siken

6. “Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.”

— Richard Siken

7. “Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.”

— Richard Siken

8. “He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.”

— Richard Siken

9. “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.”

— Richard Siken

10. “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.”

— Richard Siken

11. “I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.”

— Richard Siken

12. “I am singing now while Rome burns.”

— Richard Siken

13. “I’m not suggesting the world is good, that life is easy, or that any of us are entitled to better. But please, isn’t this the kind of thing you talk about in somber tones, in the afternoon, with some degree of hope and maybe even a handful of strategies?”

— Richard Siken

14. “Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?”

— Richard Siken

15. “A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us, only pretending to be invisible.”

— Richard Siken

16. “Land a man in a landscape and he’ll try to conquer it. Make him handsome and you’re a fascist, make him ugly and you’re saying nothing new.”

— Richard Siken

17. “We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making those long noodles you love so much.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

19. “If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”

— Richard Siken

20. “You play along, because you want to die for love, you always have.”

— Richard Siken

21. “Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”

— Richard Siken

22. “How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?”

— Richard Siken

23. “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.”

— Richard Siken

24. “I’m bleeding, I’m not just making conversation.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

26. “Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.”

— Richard Siken

27. “The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.”

— Richard Siken

28. “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.”

— Richard Siken

29. “You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you.”

— Richard Siken

30. “Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.”

— Richard Siken

31. “I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body.”

— Richard Siken

32. “There are many names in history, but none of them are ours.”

— Richard Siken

33. “Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks.”

— Richard Siken

34. “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.”

— Richard Siken

35. “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.”

— Richard Siken

36. “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.”

— Richard Siken

37. “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.”

— Richard Siken

38. “When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.”

— Richard Siken

39. “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.”

— Richard Siken

40. “There’s a black dog and there’s a white dog, depends on which you feed, depends on which damn dog you live with.”

— Richard Siken

41. “Here we are, at the place where I get to beg for it. Where I get to say ‘Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me? We can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?’ But we both know how it goes – I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.”

— Richard Siken

42. “Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.”

— Richard Siken

43. “The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”

— Richard Siken

44. “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.”

— Richard Siken

45. “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.”

— Richard Siken

46. “You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet.”

— Richard Siken

47. “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.”

— Richard Siken

48. “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.”

— Richard Siken

49. “You will die in your sleep and leave everything unfinished. This is also speculation. I had obligations: hope, but hope negates the experience. I owe myself nothing. I cut off my head and threw it on the ground.”

— Richard Siken

50. “It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be.”

— Richard Siken