Blake Butler Quotes
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There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same women with whom they'd made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.
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I'm not an escapist, but the value of language is that it can create places that did not exist before. And so language for me doesn't reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future - that's how evolution occurs.
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I am a serial monogamist of sorts, and have been with my girlfriend for almost four years. In imagining my brain back to worlds where I might be around someone other sexed in that way and not know them that well, speaking out loud almost seems like requiring of demon language, or money spurting.
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One man assigned outside the door where Gravey sleeps or does not sleep nights gets off duty at the crack of dawn having stood parallel to the wall between them for most of seven hours, walks to his car, unlocks the door, enters through the driver’s side seat, slides across the leather into the passenger side, straps on his seatbelt, takes out his service revolver, puts it in his mouth, and shoots his body dead.
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So many doors forever. There were never enough. Each door had several locks. One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was a simple side latch. Another was strictly ornamental. Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have.
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What if life after death is all based within memory: you die, and you don't ascend on a bed of clouds to Jesus, but your brain has a terrain that it can use to propel itself further. It's more of a theoretical afterlife. If that's true, all of these theoretical afterlives of people could potentially interact or network. That space seems way more powerful and exciting than reality. This potential boundlessness is more of what god is to me.
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I taught them how precisely to explode and still exist.
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After the confession, still inside his sleeping, a massive boil shaped like a bird’s egg appears on his left hand between his point finger and his thumb. When medics drain the boil, from the pustule’s face floods a creamy darkish oil. The runoff will be stored in a glass vial in a black locker several miles from Gravey’s fleshy self, no one seeing what the wet does in the darkness when no longer watched.
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Their knees were purple like a machete in the mouth of a horse I’d loved and kissed and cannot remember now but for how one day he’d simply disappeared into my blood.
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I think language is a system that we have devised to negotiate a series of more amorphous entities. It's a layer you can use to see where those things exist, but if you don't have anyone speaking anymore, those things are still there. The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.
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I thought of my father, alone and elsewhere, his head cradled in his hands. I thought of the day he'd punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she'd be tucked away inside. All those places he'd looked and never found. Inside their mattress. In stained-glass windows. How he'd scoured the carpet for her stray hair and strung them all together with a ribbon; how he'd slept with that one lock swathed across his nostrils, hugging a pillow fitted with a nightshirt. How he'd dug up the backyard, stripped and sweating. How he'd played her favorite album on repeat and loud, a lure. How when we took up the carpet in my bedroom to find her, under the carpet was wood. Under the wood there was cracked concrete. Under the concrete there was dirt. Under the dirt there was a cavity of water. I swam down into the water with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn't see a thing.
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Skins on skins against a wide unveiling in hair like riots in the false collaborative witness. Seas in spinning silence of the corridors of plasmatic fish rising to fit their homes against our home as well and writhe the poison of their 300,000,000 heads of hidden sickness, upon the tongues of those the dying night had yet to memorize.
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I'm really close to my mom, but things with my dad have been different. He has dementia and watching him change, I've actually started to think that it's a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he's a child and everything is new, which seems more honest.
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I like smartasses, because I can be smartass back and rashy.
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It is important not to show too many inches at once.
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About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.
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All the names of the new and certain dead were falling out of the air like little 4-D scabs the TV weathermen mistook as hail. Each house ever had a number you could use to speak into it, and so often I would use the phone inside my brain to call these people I’d soon visit and just sit there breathing my dinner into their head.
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The running bead of loss of our pulling the color from our hair, pulling the flat out of the skin into the bunched meat of long windows in us purpled over and caved in and laughed and asked and rinsed off and here again Flood is laughing and the floods of Flood are watching Flood. Here again Flood sees Flood forced forever left unending.
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Yes, he’d loved someone some years some way back before he was him now and can’t remember anything about her but her teeth, which he now feels having grown in behind his own teeth, eating what he eats before he eats.
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Reality is overrated to me. Everyone spends enough time on the computer, eating, going out to bars. Why do I need to read a book about that?
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My love is inside me where my fat was.
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These were my people; cells in my best image; my negation and deletion. In seeing them, I named them, and they began to spurt. She leaned with her whole life to kiss me. I was awake again and so was Darrel, the most awake we’d ever been. I walked through the kitchen over the piles of sleeping or prone pleased bodies to pretend I could see out through the mirror over the window to the flat backyard.
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Hours later I knew for certain I had felt the presence of this choking, slaving smell before, sometime when I was very young, inside my sleep, but this does not occur to me at the time. I come back out into the main room. I stand among the pictures and the light. I decide there’s no reason to report this, that I should not have come here, that I feel older than I ever had all through my blood. I feel dizzy in the middle of the photographs of her, the mirrors, a silent catacomb of eyes. That’s when I realize I’m being recorded.
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I write all day every day, so when I feel unproductive, it magnifies everything else.