Richard Siken Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
-- Richard Siken -
“You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.”
-- Richard Siken -
“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he still left with his hands”
-- Richard Siken -
“I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation.”
-- Richard Siken -
“...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 -
“He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.”
-- Richard Siken -
“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 -
“Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. 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 -
“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 -
“The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Everything affects my poetry, every day something happens that changes me forever. I’m susceptible and plastic, thin-skinned and moody.”
-- Richard Siken -
“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 -
“When you have nothing to say, set something on fire.”
-- Richard Siken -
“This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero.”
-- Richard Siken -
“The narrator blames the birds. And you want to blame the birds as well. I blamed the birds for a long time. But in this story everyone is hungry, even the birds. And at this point in the story so many things have gone wrong, so many bad decisions made, that it’s a wonder anyone would want to continue reading.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.”
-- Richard Siken -
“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 -
“Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.”
-- Richard Siken -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!”
-- Richard Siken -
“You re falling now. You re swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.”
-- Richard Siken -
“Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.”
-- Richard Siken -
“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
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