Top 180 Richard Siken Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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?”

— Richard Siken

52. “What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once.”

— Richard Siken

53. “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.”

— Richard Siken

54. “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

55. “There’s a part in the movie where you can see right through the acting, where you can tell that I’m about to burst into tears, right before I burst into tears.”

— Richard Siken

56. “These are the dreams we should be having. I shouldn’t have to clean them up like this.”

— Richard Siken

57. “Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me?”

— Richard Siken

58. “Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses – I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole.”

— Richard Siken

59. “And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up I’m getting to it.”

— Richard Siken

60. “I wouldn’t kill your pony. I’d like to believe it, anyway. I’d like to believe I wouldn’t drag you out in to the woods and leave you there, either. So far, it hasn’t come up.”

— Richard Siken

61. “I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking.”

— Richard Siken

62. “There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you.”

— Richard Siken

63. “They want you to love the whole damn world but you won’t.”

— Richard Siken

64. “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.”

— Richard Siken

65. “The best part of spirituality is reverence. There are other parts. Some people like to hear the sound of their own voice. If you don’t believe in the world it would be stupid to paint it. If you don’t believe in God, then who are you talking to?”

— Richard Siken

66. “This is also part of the story: how the story changes.”

— Richard Siken

67. “You wonder what he’s thinking when he shivers like that.”

— Richard Siken

68. “I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?”

— Richard Siken

69. “Don’t move. Keep staring straight into my eyes.”

— Richard Siken

70. “You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?”

— Richard Siken

71. “I’m sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.”

— Richard Siken

72. “I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I’d rather quit. I’d rather be sad. It’s too much work.”

— Richard Siken

73. “Tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more.”

— Richard Siken

74. “The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.”

— Richard Siken

75. “In the dream I don’t tell anyone, you put your head in my lap.”

— Richard Siken

76. “We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven...”

— Richard Siken

77. “I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy.”

— Richard Siken

78. “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.”

— Richard Siken

79. “I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.”

— Richard Siken

80. “What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.”

— Richard Siken

81. “This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”

— Richard Siken

82. “Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.”

— Richard Siken

83. “But damn if there isn’t anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.”

— Richard Siken

84. “Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?”

— Richard Siken

85. “I don’t really blame you for being dead but you can’t have your sweater back.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

87. “Someone is digging your grave right now.”

— Richard Siken

88. “Here I am in a rabbit run, here I am in a valley of pine, waiting for you to find me. I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone – assume a middle distance and transcend myself – but I’m taking to you and you know it.”

— Richard Siken

89. “You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

91. “I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything.”

— Richard Siken

92. “Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody.”

— Richard Siken

93. “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.”

— Richard Siken

94. “I’m sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.”

— Richard Siken

95. “He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place – well then, game over.”

— Richard Siken

96. “You are here. You are here. You’re still right here.”

— Richard Siken

97. “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.”

— Richard Siken

98. “I will come back from the dead for you.”

— Richard Siken

99. “I kept my mind on the moon.”

— Richard Siken

100. “Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable – your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers – and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.”

— Richard Siken