Coexistence Quotes

“It's October, and the shorter days have made us hungrier, depriving us of light and forcing us to look for it in other people.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“I wrote about the future because I wanted to invent it. I wrote about the present so that it wouldn't obliterate me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“A photograph represents the past without bringing it to life. A photograph gives shape to history; it allows us to fashion a landscape of feeling, suppressing whatever other emotional detail is ungovernable. A photograph is a ladder that goes backward in time, a ladder we can push away whenever we want. With photographs, we can obscure the past as much as illuminate it.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“That's what love is -- someone else's spirit moving through you. When someone moves through you they leave behind a small trace of human life. It's how we know we're still alive.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“It occurs to me that one also has to love despite the geographical violence of colonialism. I want to love in a way that has geographical consequences.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“I shouldn't treat my body like a shore for others to shipwreck onto. Somehow no one has told me this yet.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“That was how love changed people: it made you want to give yourself over to new pasts, to future emotional histories. It made you ache to be alive.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Rain on the West Coast was as much a part of the fabric of existence as economic precarity.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“But I don't want to be the kind of person who's always finding new ways to define loneliness.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Most books I read stay with me, linger in my mind, changing the architecture of my thoughts.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“I resist tiredness. I want to extend the day for as long as I can. To sleep feels like a betrayal of living. So I close my eyes and try to remember everything, which is also called dreaming.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“In a single living moment all of the world's beauty and terror can coexist.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Washed in yellow, his face looks different, but beautiful still. I feel beautiful because he's looking at me. Is that what beauty is - a relation to proximity, a shared subjectivity?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Shame is a flickering streetlight in the middle of the night. Shame has turned me into a flickering man in the middle of my own life.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“I use language like an unsentimental tool, something depersonalized and brutish. When I'm horny I'm a small frenzy, more weather than person.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“If a mother is a shape of unknowing, then a son is a bit of dying light.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Louise thinks about the reserve today and shudders at the thought of it suddenly emptied of children. A place without children has no future.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“To be a mother is to represent for someone else life as an abstract quality.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Louise opens her eyes.
"I hope heaven looks like the rez," she says.
Paul laughs, but he's also crying.
"I hope it's autumn all the time.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“In Louise's mind, Paul and Julia would always be at a distance from each other, even if that distance was quite small to others. Louise believed it was big enough to engulf them both; love didn't always have to mean a spectacle of difference. What wounded Paul most was that Louise saw a trace of this otherness in him too. It was her way of saying, You're becoming someone else, someone I barely know.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“A son without a mother and a father is a bit of forgotten history, a lost country of the mind.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“The forest, conversely, is dense with night. At this hour, it must be silently bustling with life, with animals attempting to live a little longer. In bed with T I felt dense with the desire to live longer.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Perhaps I'm inventing my own archive. This diary will serve as the ur-text that puts my previous artworks into context. The context is that I'm suffering and the world is dazzlingly incoherent. To return to the site of one's upbringing shouldn't be an experience of incoherence. Somehow, it is.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“The future is something I can breathe in. I can breathe in time like words, like complete sentences.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“When they kissed Jack felt truly outside. Inside, outside, these were now the terms that shaped his reality. One could be outside but still inside. Lucy was his new outside. It was terrifying and glorious how firmly Jack believed this.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“In the patch of forest across the road, there were two deer grazing, a stag and a doe. Jack watched them in awe, took in their grace and vulnerability as though they were good omens sent personally to him. They were two reasons to live, to reasons to believe he could defy the odds history had stacked against him.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“If I wasn't a poet, the feeling might've destroyed me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“I didn't tell him that I never wanted to "live off" my poems. Rather my poems enabled me to keep living.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“Tom smiles. It's all so domestic. I want to have a domestic life. I want all our minor inconveniences to orbit around a meaningful axis. I want the petty feuds and the awkward silences. Suddenly I don't feel anxious.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

“The thought clarifies something in me. I have earned myself two years to make art. I have two years to love Tom in a new city, to make future memories we'll someday cherish. I have two years to possibly fail, but if I do I also have two years to indulge in the pleasures of trying again.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories