Best Siken Quotes

#1. You are here. You are here. You're still right here.

Richard Siken

#2. 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

#3. Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death.

Louise Gluck

#4. From a literary standpoint, I've been loving Raymond Carver's short stories, William Carlos Williams' poems, Richard Siken's 'Crush', John Fante, and Jim Harrison's book of ghazals. I love film and photography too, so many of my songs are very image rich from those influences.

Greta Salpeter

#5. Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.

Richard Siken

#6. I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.

Richard Siken

#7. 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

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

Richard Siken

#9. If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

Richard Siken

#10. 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

#11. Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure.
I'm sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.

Richard Siken

#12. 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

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

Richard Siken

#14. 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

#15. 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.

Richard Siken

#16. 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

#17. You're waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we are in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn't make sense.

Richard Siken

#18. 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.

Richard Siken

#19. Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. One more tale to stay alive.

Louise Gluck

#20. 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

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

Richard Siken

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once.

Richard Siken

#26. you're all I ever wanted

and worth dying for too

Richard Siken

#27. Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

Richard Siken

#28. Moonlight making crosses on your body, and me putting my mouth on every one.

Richard Siken

#29. 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

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

Richard Siken

#31. 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

#32. 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