5 Quotes by Billy-Ray Belcourt

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.

Some of us might seek to be one step ahead of memory, to whittle the loose ends of our personal histories down to a single knowable object (a block of clay or a diary or a memoir), to expose a kind of hidden or suppressed truth, to give it a form, to contain it, to master it.

If I'm more of a toy to be wound up than a man, can I write beautiful things?

What an ugly, necessary monster I made of myself." from "The Wall Clock Caught Fire From Neglect