A Minor Chorus Quotes

“Death itself wasn't nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time … the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Maybe early on I determined I didn't have to live … I just had to be alive.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Rather than change the world, a novel could index a longing for something else, for a different arrangement of bodies, feelings, and environments in which human flourishing wasn't inhibited for the marginalized, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“What if I wrote something that sounded like dozens of people in protest?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“I write because I've read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I've loved and been loved. I want to find out what "we" or "us" I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“I asked Micheal if he’d ever felt empty, like something was missing, to which he said emptiness wasn’t something to run from. We all begin with emptiness, he argued: an empty name, an empty house, an empty life. Mine is a life of beginnings, he said. Every morning I start over.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Could a place have a soul?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“How instead to make a novel into a bomb? How to plant a novel in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation? How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“The late summer sun was already quite low in the sky as I continued driving. It was red, like an apple. I was a red man. My longing was red. My heart was a ripe fruit.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“There was a lot I didn't know, but I knew that with total certainty.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“For all he knew, I was a small town he could get lost inside of;
for all I knew, he was a cliff I could hurl myself from.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“If anything would save two Cree boys from the throes of a world that wasn't built for them it would be love and little else.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“They were boys who knew only how to fail at boyhood … It was like an ethnographic spectacle.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“I was going to make something
that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“In a matter of days, I confirmed a number of interviewees, all of whom were amiable and eager to participate, a symptom, to my mind, of an urge to perform the novelistic as a kind of abstract moral value (an urge I found relatable). During the phone calls, it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one’s mouth, would it taste like the earth?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“All I'm good for is love, I think.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus

“Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“A fetish is a fetish because of its aura of unattainability. What if part of me refused love as much as I ached for it? What if I wanted to destroy myself as much as I wanted to be saved?”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“When I was growing up, everyone around me was in a relationship. Some of the couples in my family had been together for decades. No one was single, and if they were, they were treated with circumspection. Loneliness was a curse, something to be avoided at all costs. I’ve always felt desperate to be in love, even as a closeted teenager, especially as a closeted teenager.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“The other day, he told me, it occurred to him that the anger he directed at his son was, in actuality, anger at himself, for failing to open up space for his son to experiment and make mistakes and challenge the adults around him.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“I was struck, though I didn’t mention it, by this “we,” a pronoun as vast and emotional as history. Lena, on account of having been on the rez her whole life, could marshal this collective voice. She was one of many in a chorus that sang of flourishing and grief.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“What seems to be resonant with everyone I interviewed is the belief that we have to tell our stories, that storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel

“guarded each other’s peace and solitude when we did come together, which is Rilke’s trusted definition of love.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus: A Novel