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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Tears don't always just fall; sometimes they rip through you, like storm-painted gusts instead of mere raindrops.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“The sweetness we deny ourselves because the world is wailing.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then I might as well make a weapon out of myself.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Some songs take women places men cannot
follow.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“In America, a gathering of people is called target practice or a funeral, depending on who lives long enough to define the terms.”
― Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World

“However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Everyone has a lie we’re quietly waiting to believe.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“ Reach high for the stars that hidden in your soul. Dream precedes the goal”
― SAEEDJONES

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise

“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?”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“A man might still decide that when he looks at you, all he sees is a nigger, a faggot, or both.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“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.”
― saeed jones, When the Only Light Is Fire

“I grieve the men
I mistook for one another and the mistakes I mistook for men.”
― Saeed Jones, Alive at the End of the World

“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.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives