Crush by Richard Siken is a poetry collection. The author is a North-American poet, filmmaker, and painter. In this collection of poetry, Richard writes about grief, loss, infatuation, and intimacy.
If you are a reader who loves poems and hasn’t read this book, then you’ve such a wonderful experience waiting for you. As for us, we have read this book already. This book made us cry till we couldn’t breathe properly. It’s an amazing book filled with such raw emotions that it’s bound to stir some emotions in any reader.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from this unforgettable book that we rated 5 stars.
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“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
“We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
“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.”
“Tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more.”
“Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.”
“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?”
“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.”
“I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly.”
“Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.”
“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.”
But damn if there isn’t anything sexier than a slender boy with a handgun, a fast car, a bottle of pills.”
“The way you slam your body into mine reminds me I’m alive, but monsters are always hungry, darling.”
“The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through.”
“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.”
“History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history… but none of them are ours.”
“Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks.”
“This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish.”
“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.”
“we are at the crossroads, my little outlaw, and this is the map of my heart, the landscape after cruelty”
But we both know how it goes—I say I want you inside me and you hold my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.”
“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.”
“We’re shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.”
“We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making those long noodles you love so much.”
And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy. And the boy who loves you in the wrong way keeps weakening. You thought if you handed over your body he’d do something interesting.”
“We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor… When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.”
“Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart.”
“You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that. I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that. You weren’t supposed to.”
“I don’t really blame you for being dead but you can’t have your sweater back.”
“There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.”
I never liked that ending either.
“Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you.”
I want to tell you this story without having to be in it
“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.”
“Verse. Chorus. Verse. I’m sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.”
“Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here’s the desire to put it inside us, and then the question behind every question: What happens next?”
“I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything.”
“Cut me open and the light streams out. Stitch me up and the light keeps streaming out between the stitches.”
“Anything past the horizon is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but you only see the sky.”
“You’re going to die in your best friend’s arms. And you play along because it’s funny, because it’s written down, you’ve memorized it, it’s all you know. I say the phrases that keep it all going, and everybody plays along.”
“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you.”
“You a fever I am learning to live with.”
“You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.”
“The boy’s no good. The boy is just no good. / but he takes you in his arms and pushes your flesh around to see if you could ever be ugly to him.”
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