Saeed Jones Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.

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.

The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.

Maybe, a decade older than I was, he knew what I would eventually learn: it’s possible for two men to become addicted to the damage they do to each other.

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

Some songs take women places men cannot follow.

America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

The sons of single mothers inevitably encounter well-meaning family members who like to remind us of our role as "the man of the house." The statement usually made me wince, the way it implicitly merged the roles of son, father, and husband; the way it erased the grown woman to whom the house actually belonged.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

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.

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

Everyone has a lie we’re quietly waiting to believe.

However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us.

I buried myself in the bodies of other men so I could feel something other than the depression that was rolling in like a fog bank.

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?

It was if I wanted credit for rescuing my mother from a fire that I had set and couldn’t put out. I wasn’t the man of the house; I was the kid who’d finally lit his first match.

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 grieve the men I mistook for one another and the mistakes I mistook for men.

We’re not crazy. We’re just not in the dark anymore. And my goodness, we can see you so clearly now.

Too much had happened for me to keep waking up surrounded by the lie of continuity.

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

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 believed that I could control any story I told. If something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting, if you could pin everything to the page afterward.

The first book that stopped me was for parents dealing with gay children. The introduction was worded like it was intended for readers coping with a late-stage cancer diagnosis. I put the book back on the shelf, wrong side out.

This place so coursing and vibrant that wonders would flash past whether you were watching or not. The city’s electric hum would stay with me. I knew I had to return to those streets and sidewalks, crowded with people who had found a way to be themselves.

PRETENDING TO DROWN The only regret is that I waited longer than a breath to scatter the sun's reflection with my body. New stars burst upon the water when you pulled me in. On the shore, our clothes begged us to be good boys again. Every stick our feet touched a snapping turtle, every shadow a water moccasin. Excuses to swim closer to one another. 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. Suddenly still, a clear view of what you knew I wanted to see. When I resurfaced, slick grin, knowing glance; you pushed me back under. I pretended to drown, then swallowed you whole.

...and because you’re young and don’t know the difference between abandoned and alone just like your mother’s heart won’t know the difference between beat and attack.

I though productivity was what survival looked like.

The end of the world was mistaken for just another midday massacre in America.

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

A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.

History hurt more than any weapon inflicted on us. It hit back harder than any weapon we could wield, any weapon we could turn ourselves into.

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.

There is something about being able to study another man’s body. No sneaking glances or peeks, no pretending to be looking at something else. There is something about the unshielded gaze.

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.

In reality, I was a lanky, black, obvious teenager, obviously effeminate too, if given an opportunity to move or speak. But from a distance, maybe my body transformed, as the bodies of young black men are wont to do when stared at by white people in this country. Maybe my spine stretched itself into a basketball player’s posture, this stranger’s gaze giving me something I could never quite seem to give myself: the sense of being a real man, strong, even intimidating.

THE BLUE DRESS Her blue dress is a silk train is a river is water seeps into the cobblestone steps of my sleep, is still raining is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles is goodbye in a flooded, antique room, is goodbye in a room of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the ring-ting-ring of water dripping from the mouths of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the Mississippi river is a hallway, is leaks like tears from windowsills of a drowned house, is windows open to waterfalls is a bed is a small boat is a ship, is a currant come to carry me in its arms through the streets, is me floating in her dress through the streets is the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a blue dress out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea.

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’ve lined my throat with the river bottom’s best silt, allowed my fingers to shrivel and be taken for crawfish. I’ve laced my eyelashes with algae. I blink emerald. I blink sea glass green. I am whatever gleams just under the surface. Scoop at my sparkle. I’ll give you nothing but disturbed reflection. Bring your ear to the water and I’ll sing you down into my arms. Let me show you how to make your lungs a home for minnows, how to let them flicker like silver in and out of your mouth like last words, like air.

If standing over the unconscious body of a man who, just moments before, had tried to bash my head in is the closest I will ever come to feeling like a god, I can say now that I understand how a god might look down at a mortal man and love him all the more, precisely because of his vulnerability. There was no part of Daniel left to hide from me. I’d seen how much he wanted another man; I’d seen the storm he’d been struggling his entire life to contain; I’d seen how much he feared and raged against himself; I’d seen so much more of myself in him than I ever could’ve expected when I first saw him. I didn’t know real men hurt the way I’d been hurting.

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 older I got, the more frequently my mother and I would push each other to the precipice of what we actually needed to say, only to back off just before either of us was forced to get more specific than vague allusions to 'feelings' and 'questions.' But this only meant that the unanswered questions became ever more loaded

My mother's body wouldn't recover so much as bide its time against her heart's inevitable betrayal.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

When I looked up, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, almost pleadingly—as if I'd led someone afraid of heights to the edge of a rusting bridge. And then I did exactly what 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 felt swept along, swept past. It annoyed me, how easily she was able to pry me away from myself. When I put down the phone, though, my frustration curdled into shame. How could I begrudge the woman who raised me on her own? How dare I, when she had found it in herself to keep loving her own mother through decades of ups and downs?

Rush

Everyone has a lie we're quietly waiting to believe.

Auto-buy YA authors for me include Marie Marquardt, Rachael Stewart Allen, Lauren Morrill, Aisha Saeed, Nic Stone, Malinda Lo, A. S. King, Kristin Cashore, and Sabaa Tahir. I also love mysteries, so Karen McManus and Kara Thomas dominate my “to be read” pile. But the book/author that inspired me to write was The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. That book is so carefully, beautifully, and intricately constructed, it knocked me over. I finished it, and immediately flipped back to the first page to read again, and thought, “I want to learn to do something even half as captivating as this someday!

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.

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?

I don't watch the video but I can feel it playing on a loop in a room miles away from where he keeps dying behind my eyes. All I have left are tiny twitches, small choices. "Please," I beg alone in the box of my dark, "I don't want to hurt that way today. I already hurt that way yesterday. Please don't kill him again.

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.

I'm most dangerous when I'm hungry. I'm most hungry when I'm hurting. Seems like I'm always hurting.

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

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.

These hands can’t find the walls,

winter stars stitched into puddles

windows open to waterfalls

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.

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.

I was proud of my exhaustion, as if the darkness circling my eyes was proof of my adulthood. Proof that I could hold my own, no longer just a son or grandson but an I.

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.

You were never going to be one of them, said the lightning in my shoulder. Stupid, stupid, stupid, answered the thunder in my fists. I felt like I’d been split open.

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.

The spectacle of ordinary gay men baffled me.

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.

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

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

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

He seemed to thrive on creating a sense of order, on understanding the tasks to be taken care of.

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.

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.

I hungered for the power of the all-American man, the Marlboro Man and the Marlboro Man's firstborn son, the high-school quarterback, the company's future CEO, Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne, Odysseus, Hercules, Achilles, the shield itself, the stone-cut archetype, the goddamned Everyman, the golden boy, the one.

If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.

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.

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

AC had been broken all summer. A breeze drifted into the car, then slipped away as if it knew to leave us alone.

He turned it facedown on the nightstand then set upon me like the sunlight itself.

to escape the wreck of someone else’s memory.

They die bright, fantastic deaths every chance they get.