Saeed Jones Quotes

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

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.

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

I’d never thought of myself as “one of the boys.

"You never forget your first "faggot." Because the memory, in its way, makes you. It becomes a spine for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on. Before you were just scrawny; now you're scrawny because you're a faggot. Before you were just bookish; now you're bookish because you're a faggot."

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

I began meeting people’s eyes, shaking their hands confidently, and introducing a person who I wasn’t exactly, all while smiling.

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.

And if, by chance, you asked him if he thought that girl was hot, he wouldn’t give you a clear answer one way or another. He would just rush on to the next sentence and ask where you were from.

a current come to carry me in its arms through the streets,

bottle of Bacardi 151 in one hand and shot glasses in the other. Then one shot and another shot, and two more

How did other people concentrate with all these bodies just walking around all the time? So many men and boys, each with bodies to study and memorize.

If only someone would give me the script so I could perform my role accordingly.

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.

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.