Richard Siken Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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

Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things. I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that’s the dealio—you’re a train and I’m a trainstation and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story.

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.

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.

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.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grain of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.

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

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

Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.

I am singing now while Rome burns.

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.

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.

Someone is digging your grave right now.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.