Top 180 Richard Siken Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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?”

— Richard Siken

102. “The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”

— Richard Siken

103. “Fairy tales have rules. You are a princess or you aren’t. You are pure at heart or you aren’t. If you are pure at heart, or lucky, you might catch a break.”

— Richard Siken

104. “From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.”

— Richard Siken

105. “You’d break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells.”

— Richard Siken

106. “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.”

— Richard Siken

107. “A stone on the path means the tea’s not ready, a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you still hasn’t hit bottom.”

— Richard Siken

108. “When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.”

— Richard Siken

109. “Anything past the horizon is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but you only see the sky.”

— Richard Siken

110. “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.”

— Richard Siken

111. “Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.”

— Richard Siken

112. “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.”

— Richard Siken

113. “Everyone in this room got here somehow and everyone in this room will have to leave.”

— Richard Siken

114. “You could drown in those eyes.”

— Richard Siken

115. “Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.”

— Richard Siken

116. “You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing.”

— Richard Siken

117. “To be a bird, or a flock of birds doing something together, one or many, starling or murmuration. To be a man on a hill, or all the men on all the hills, or half a man shivering in the flock of himself.”

— Richard Siken

118. “We are all just trying to be holy.”

— Richard Siken

119. “Kissing degenerates into biting.”

— Richard Siken

120. “You a fever I am learning to live with.”

— Richard Siken

121. “I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

— Richard Siken

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

— Richard Siken

123. “History is painted by the winners.”

— Richard Siken

124. “Anyone can paint a mask. It’s boring. And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself.”

— Richard Siken

125. “Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can’t go through with it. I just don’t want to die anymore.”

— Richard Siken

126. “We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”

— Richard Siken

127. “I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time. a stone in the hand means somebody’s angry, the stone inside you still hasn’t hit bottom.”

— Richard Siken

128. “You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.”

— Richard Siken

129. “I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth.”

— Richard Siken

130. “Let’s say that God is the space between two men and the Devil is the space between two men.”

— Richard Siken

131. “Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.”

— Richard Siken

132. “I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.”

— Richard Siken

133. “I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.”

— Richard Siken

134. “What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long. I find parts that overlap with mine and light them up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink, the flicker of his mouth a purple rust.”

— Richard Siken

135. “Is there an acceptable result? Do we mean something when we talk?”

— Richard Siken

136. “To them he is a mirror, but to you he is a room.”

— Richard Siken

137. “Consider the hairpin turn. It is waiting for you like a red door.”

— Richard Siken

138. “It’s simple: it isn’t over, it’s just begun. It’s green. It’s still green.”

— Richard Siken

139. “I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth.”

— Richard Siken

140. “I’ll call you darling, hold you tight.”

— Richard Siken

141. “The machine of the world- if you don’t grab on, you begin to tremble. And if you do grab on, then everything trembles.”

— Richard Siken

142. “There is rarely any joy in a frictionless space, so find your inner viscosity.”

— Richard Siken

143. “There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here.”

— Richard Siken

144. “The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. It’s thinking of love.”

— Richard Siken

145. “Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man, Can I tell you something? The other man says, No. A man says to another man, There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you don’t.”

— Richard Siken

146. “I’ve seen your true face: the back of your head. If you were walking away, keep walking.”

— Richard Siken

147. “You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.”

— Richard Siken

148. “Willpower, gunpowder, concussive thunder. Pink, orange, red, orange dreaming red.”

— Richard Siken

149. “Logic is boring because it works. Being unreasonable is exciting.”

— Richard Siken

150. “The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.”

— Richard Siken