Three Hundred Million Quotes

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“The shrinking house was packed in angles of mushy arm meat and abdomens in such ways I couldn’t walk to see who was there or what food I would not eat. The sexdrives of the molding prior bodies of the dead refracted through me in the silence of the act of spreading of our silence outside the house. We clearly knew one day we’d have to all kill one another to become All, and why not begin now?”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“I put the girl’s teeth shaped like my mother’s teeth into my own mouth and on her teeth I chewed until I heard my own teeth in my head breaking and I swallowed and I smiled.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed.

I'm wearing a gown made of the hair we'd never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder.

Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I'd already walked I knew I could not walk back.

The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“Worse than knowing I needed out, I didn't know what I needed back into. Even when I could feel there was something else beyond the edges of any color in the street or window where no one waited even to just totally ignore me, I couldn't recognize it enough to know how to want it harder. Along each street it was as if I were waiting for some hole to swallow my face. Each moment it didn't made the going into the next step that much less worth doing. This is what life had always felt like. In my mind, expecting the absence of something or someone there before me made the presence in its place feel like the punch line to a routine no one was performing. And where I couldn't find a way to laugh, I became my own stand-in, over and over, like painting white over a window from the inside.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“Under the wake of all of night we went again. We wedded the public with the private; tunneled through the holes in the houses the darkness graced as welcome mats made of the dirt of the buried, gifting access into each home, and enough desire to slip into each denatured, dragging the future. Into each I went, too, split in my dimension to replicate across the universe of homes.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“We burned the bras we burned the hair we burned the credit cards and cash we burned the rings around the fingers we broke the fingers and the nails we burned the burning in their loins we burned them and we burned them. The lessons pilled up on the floor like the dream of a wall around our people that could not be felt. The colors of their lipsticks and foldings and our dry hump was overwriting the previous year’s best clothing designers’ dreamlives, thereby overriding yours.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“sulking the amalgamation memory of our uncoming to the future diamond skull our last god longed for.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“could hear the mother quiver through the house’s circuits, burning like star meat. She had a few more thoughts to think through unto the becoming zero. Her god was off duty tonight, somewhere like Disney. My teeth were greasy with intent to do exactly what I was doing. I had a boner and a cough. I heard Darrel in me getting stoned on our blood bowling open like locked darkrooms, black cabinets full of speaker coils.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“loved these mothers. Where I licked the skin burned and left a bruise in the shape of someone turning off a lamp inside a hive.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“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.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“I taught them how precisely to explode and still exist.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“This word occurs because of god. In our year here god is not a being but a system, composed in dehydrated fugue. Under terror-sleep alive we hear it heaving in and out from the long bruises on our communal eternal corpse, consuming memory. The wrecking flesh of Him surrounds, holds us laced together every hour, overflowing and wide open, permeable to inverse, which no identity survives. As god is love, so is god not love. Same as I could kill you any minute, I could become you, and you wouldn’t even feel the shift. Only when there’s no one left to alter, all well beyond any ending or beginning, can actuality commence.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“Inside no sound, each present edge still disappeared into the next. The white of the light inside the silence between language made my own skin seem miles denser in comparison, and the idea of all previous occurrences even thicker, to the point of impossibility. Along the air there was the void of something exploding continuously and unendingly, light pouring through where words weren’t.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“No word we made was ever ours; none of what we’d said were the words we’d meant at all inside you or me and instead a word in our blood turned and turned, the same word over and over, all the hours, against the measure of the sand, until even you could not recognize you recognizing you inside you and instead inside the house we fell into something soft inside the silence between twin iterations of the word and there you were, and the years continue again and spin rewinding and inside the light inside the seeing.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million

“Not dying when everybody else did die is like dying harder than everybody else.”
― Blake Butler, Three Hundred Million