Saeed Jones Quotes

"A few months and many deaths ago, I asked someone "how are you doing" and felt, in the way her eye fell, how I had failed her before I had even reached the end of my question. I've hurt many people but it's the unintended wounds I claim now as children."

That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.

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.

And then I did exactly what I thought all people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.

They die bright, fantastic deaths every chance they get.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood.

I slipped on the forcefully carefree posture of the other boys around me. The existential shrug of young men afraid to admit that they’ve been touched by art, and that they want to be touched in that way again.

I'm most dangerous when I'm hungry. I'm most hungry

when I'm hurting. Seems like I'm always hurting.

I made myself a promise: Even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.

Of course I wanted to see the world, to experience its fullness. I wanted to be a real part of it, rather than the passing shadow I so often felt like. I wanted to devour the world.

I sat there ablaze, struggling to apprehend a new, darkly radiant sense of self.

I’m obsessed with manhood as a brutal and artful performance. My mind always finds its way back to the crossroad where sex, race, and power collide. Journeys, transformation, as well as dashed attempts to transform, fascinate me as well.

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…

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?

A man might still decide that when he looks at you, all he sees is a nigger, a faggot, or both.

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