A History of My Brief Body Quotes

“To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I was lonely once and that was all it took. A thick haze, a smothering opacity, this was the loneliness of feeling estranged from one’s body and, by extension, the world. My loneliness asked nothing of me, it festered with inattention. Rarely did it think out loud. I neglected my loneliness and it expanded with animosity. My loneliness grew into a forest atop me.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Memory, it seems, isn't always material out of which to make art. Sometimes remembering refuses us. Sometimes I'm a shoreline the water of memory drags its palm across.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I felt doomed, so much that objects and activities lost their aura of attraction. I didn’t yearn for anything but privacy, because it is an embarrassment to be a wound in public.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“NDN youth, listen: to be lost isn't to be unhinged from the possibility of a good life. There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn't only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the route of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“In the museum of political depression, in its tidied halls, books of the sort I want to write are banned, for they are against the world that birthed the writer.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“The thing that makes men manly is that they force everyone to be witness to their vengeance. I want no part in this.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“My kink is the annihilation of my core sense of self. On Tinder, I swipe right on post-structuralists and no one else. I’m looking for someone with whom to rent an apartment at the intersection of fissured systems of meaning. Queer as in my attraction to you is an attraction to concepts for which you are a practical substitute.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Love, then, isn't remotely about what we might lose when it inevitably dissipates. How unworkable love would be were we to subject it to a risk-cost benefits analysis!”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I wished to assassinate history’s version of me, put him to rest, let him soar into the clouds like a floating lantern. I wanted to be there, below him, with a single candle, crying for the last time.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“To love someone is to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it. We can't ask a gun for forgiveness, as its maker has already been empowered by law to shed blame, to be blameless.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“If I'm more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“But as a poet, I couldn't break the habit of trying to make the world and thus my lived life into an art object. I said yes to the world again and again, sometimes to my detriment, if only to increase the volume of my selfhood.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“My breath reeks of the loneliness of living under a bed. I confused a man for a prairie sky. Up there, in him, how I hoped to have my soured breath drained out of me!”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I want to be a bad girl
I want to be a bad girl so there’s a musicality to my rebellion
To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world
To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world
A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization
The antithesis of the bad girl is the man who self destructs”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Regardless, I forgive them just as I forgive naive versions of myself.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Don't touch my skin, it is a text in the making.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“With risk as one of the primary engines of sexual life, a body isn't a body but a battlefield.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“NDN boys are ideas before they are bodied. Our lives are muffled by a flurry of accusations that outrun us.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to hold. In hugging me, my dad teaches me how to be held.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“To write is live on. The page rescues us from a longing for finality. Grief doesn't wholly assail our imaginations. The creative drive, the artistic impulse, is above all a thunderous yes to life.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“All my most volatile and consuming yearnings could be summarized as a desire for an unstructured life, one without an organizational system other than something like untidiness.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“They continue to build their lives in a bout of historical amnesia. The ungrievable, those of us who worship an impossible future, we who never were, are rarely granted as sizable a public rage as theirs on that tiny, haunted island. This is our radicalized burden, our embargoed emotivity. Your staying put isn’t an innocent stance. Nothing will make this hurt less.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“I wear worn-out words everwhere I go. In the museum of political depression, which is the world-at-large, I'm routinely mistaken for an item in an exhibition about the havoc of modernity, for I'm always out of step with the clock of the historical.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“My sadness is an elongated state of emergency. I dream in the color of sadness. I speak the bastardized language of sadness.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body