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Top 25 Billy-Ray Belcourt Quotes (2025 Update)

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”

1. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.”

2. “To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you.”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “Could a place have a soul?”

3. “Could a place have a soul?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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!”

4. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

5. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

6. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “Has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?”

7. “Has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “Don’t touch my skin, it is a text in the making.”

8. “Don’t touch my skin, it is a text in the making.”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?”

9. “What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

10. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “The thing that makes men manly is that they force everyone to be witness to their vengeance. I want no part in this.”

11. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

12. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.”

13. “Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

14. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

15. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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!”

16. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

17. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

18. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

19. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

20. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

21. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man.”

22. “Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man.”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “If I’m more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things?”

23. “If I’m more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “What if I wrote something that sounded like dozens of people in protest?”

24. “What if I wrote something that sounded like dozens of people in protest?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

25. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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?”

26. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

27. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

28. “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

Billy-Ray Belcourt Quote: “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.”

29. “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

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