A History of My Brief Body
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Top 10 Best Quotes
“To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
love, indigenous, joy, writing, imagery, freedom-of-speech, memory, resistance, poetry, speech
