Saeed Jones Quotes

People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.

The only thing worse than being a disaster is being a disaster with a witness.

After having put so many years and miles between the scared little boy and the young man I had fought so hard to become, here I was again: alone in the crowd, the black kid trembling in the middle of a graveyard only he could perceive.

Tears don't always just fall; sometimes they rip through you, like storm-painted gusts instead of mere raindrops.

It's just too easy for a gay black man to drown amid the names of dead black gay men.

Toni Morrison’s sentences were like rivers with murky bottoms. They didn’t obey the rules I was learning in school. When I stepped in, I couldn’t see my feet; I retreated back to the shore.

I sank into the depths to see you as the lake saw you: cut in half by the surface, taut legs kicking, the rest of you sky.

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live. — MAMIE ELIZABETH TILL-MOBLEY

It seemed as if my life was waiting for me outside that room, like a polite guest I'd left behind at the table. It was rude to keep him waiting. It helped to think of my life as someone separate from me, a person who didn't deserve to be abandoned.

Alone and night-neoned, I write read drink drug grieve and all America keeps teaching me
is that there are so many ways to die in America which, frankly, is qwhite confusing
because this country killed you a decade ago and I’m still writing reading drinking
drugging grieving binging binging blacking out in the cozy, claustrophobic home
I’ve made out of how very, very much I miss you and the sky keeps throwing
down consequences and corrections and histories and nations, I mean,
come on, who can blame me for not wanting to go back outside?

Since no one has talked to him about such feelings, he does not know what they are. And yet he is drawn to them, to the dream-like quality of doing something he has never done before, yet knowing, somehow, how to do it.

Leaning against that wall, dispassionately sipping a beer, he was the kind of quiet I've noticed in certain men and long hungered for: the silence of men who have it all and thus find it all boring, who don't exert the energy necessary to flirt, persuade, or convince because they know America will come crawling to them on hands and knees.

I will say for myself: America, I did the best I could with what I was given.

Just as some cultures have a hundred words for “snow,” there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.

Being black can get you killed.

Being gay can get you killed.

Being a black gay boy is a death wish.

And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.