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Billy-Ray Belcourt Quotes

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All Canadian Ndn Queer Joy Love Freedom Aesthetics Ambiguity Anti Imperialism Body

Famous Billy-Ray Belcourt Quotes

“when love looks into the rubble of heartbreak he sees his kookum standing there and he thinks about how she made old worlds feel livable again and about how those who died already never forget what it is to become and unbecome a body”

Love Body Heartbreak Grandmother Kookum

Book:This Wound Is a World

Source: This Wound Is a World

“If I try to compose anything but sad poems, I fear it'll be akin to a widower trying to convince others that he has found happiness again by wearing a T-shirt that says HAPPINESS.”

Sadness Queer Canadian Ndn

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“Freedom makes breathing easier; it begets an atmosphere governed by joy, not oppression. Freedom is a measure of breathability.”

Joy Freedom Oppression Queer Canadian Ndn

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: 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.”

Joy

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“That we experience joy, however, that we can identify it... illuminates the dead end toward which the settler state hurls. In our insistence against elimination, the logical holes in the fabric of a colonial world are revealed. Wherever light rushes in is an exit route.”

Joy Resistance Anti Imperialism

Author:Billy-Ray Belcourt

“What has stayed constant between us is this cycle of losing and finding, this unending transference of vitality, without which we might feel directionless. Love of this sort, however, isn't about making a roadmap to an other who then becomes your compass. It is a proposition to nest in the unrepayable and every-mounting debt of care that stands in opposition to the careless and transactional practices of state power that mire the lives of NDNs and other minoritized populations. Having inherited your philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom, nôhkom, I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin.”

Love Care Freedom Family Racism Indigeneity

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“I'm as lonely and as brief as a country.”

Lonely Queer Canadian Ndn

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“Teens don't read for beauty, but to practice the art of disappearance.”

Reading Teens

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“What determines our lives as NDNs and/or queers are pain and trauma, love and hope. Death looms at all scales, individual to planetary.”

Love Death Hope Trauma Queer Canadian Ndn

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“Rain on the West Coast was as much a part of the fabric of existence as economic precarity.”

Capitalism Rain Weather Rainy Victoria Vancouver West Coast

Book:Coexistence: Stories

Source: Coexistence: Stories

“If I were to rank my aesthetic concerns, ambiguity would come before veracity.”

Reality Truth Writing Process Aesthetics Ambiguity Veracity Falsehoods

Book:A History of My Brief Body

Source: A History of My Brief Body

“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.”

Light October Short Stories

Book:Coexistence: Stories

Source: Coexistence: Stories