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“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

“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, Crush

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.”
― 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

“I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”
― Richard Siken

“I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
― Richard Siken

“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“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

“He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand.”
― 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, Crush

“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

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    �����𲹳ٳ󾱲Բ�.&�����ܴ�;
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“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, Crush

“You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Oh, the things we invent when we are scared
and want to be rescued.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“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, Crush

“How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“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

“And the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“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

“You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.
                 You wanted to be in love
                             and he happened to get in the way.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You just wanted to prove there was one safe place, just one safe place where you could love him. You have not found that place yet.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“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

“We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor...
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

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

“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

“No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby