Saeed Jones Quotes

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.

If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…

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

Who are you the morning after the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you? And the morning after that? How about the following week?

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

I felt like I had made the mistake of asking a fortune-teller to look into my future, and now I was being punished for trying to look too far ahead.

I wish I knew a woman who was both the light and every shadow the light pierces.

I though productivity was what survival looked like.

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.

In America, a gathering of people is called target practice or a funeral, depending on who lives long enough to define the terms.

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

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.

In that way we were both just like each other. We both allowed too deep of a contrast between our interiors and our exteriors. We both clung to self-assured masks that actually allowed us to cause ourselves more unseen harm.

We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn't answer. We texted,
begging us to call them back, but
the newly dead don't know how to
read. In America, a gathering of people
is called target practice or a funeral,
depending on who lives long enough
to define the terms.

The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.