Halle Butler > Quotes

“You can’t ask someone to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“It's all rehearsed, in a weird way. People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little of us left to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I laughed when she said “utilize” and she said “what?” and I said “just utilize, it’s a meaningless word” and then she tried to tell me that it “communicated” something different from the word “use” and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like “oh, how sweet, it tried to talk,” made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of “yeah, it communicates something, it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house, and you’re self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don’t actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word ‘use’ for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you’re the one with the big mental dick, even though ‘utilize’ is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I try to assess the things that bring me pleasure, and how those things might bring me a fulfilling career. I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie. The questions come naturally, as if supplied by the ether, and the answer sits in my empty skull: nothing, nothing, nothing.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I look for something else I could do for work but feel unqualified for everything interesting and repulsed by everything else.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“We’re so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world almost might as well not exist, for all it concerns us.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I want to go home. But not to my apartment home, to my thirteen‑years‑ago home, to my hug‑my‑mother home, say I will make her proud, apologize, explain I can do better this time, be in my bed, be in my room, look at a magazine, plan my day, start not from scratch but just a little bit back, make different decisions, try to cultivate confidence, try not to coddle bad thoughts, be better, take the right things seriously, not say the things I said to James, try to hold on to a job, monitor my expectations earlier. Bring them way down.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“When I was a child, my mom used to tell me that life was like a game, and sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do in order to do the things that you did want to do. I always thought this was strange advice. I only ever had brief and fleeting ideas for things I did want to do, but mostly I felt completely overwhelmed by possibilities, and then just went down the list saying, no, no, no, not that, not that until I was playing this idiots game of racking up things I was doing that I didn’t want to do in service of some imaginary thing I might one day stumble upon.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“There’s a lot of repetition in my life. No real routine or narrative, just a lot of repetition, and before I know it, I’m sitting in the break room drinking a cup of coffee (it doesn’t taste good) and staring at my phone again, scrolling, waiting for the motivation to get up and go to my desk.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I’ve always related to love song lyrics in a different way, usually some kind of mourning of my relationship with myself, I don’t know.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“You can't ask someone to help you without letting them know you're different than advertised, that you've been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you're uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else. Once you expose yourself as insecure, it's easy to feel resentment if you're not immediately put back at ease. If there's even a flicker, a tiny recognition of your bad qualities, the resentment kicks in, the deal is broken, and suddenly you're both angry strangers, spending hours alone in a room together and completely unsure of why.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I get socked in the chest, thinking about how things never change. How they’re on a slow-rolling slope downward, and you can think up a long list of things you’d rather do, but because of some kind of inertia, or hard facts about who you are and what life is, you always end up back where you started, sitting drunk on a hard, sticky chair with someone you hate.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I can identify one of my major problems in life as follow-through, or lack of follow-through.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I think about how every decision I make is a no, how every act is essentially a no, and I feel tears welling in my chest and face, and I think about how even if I let them out it wouldn’t make a fucking difference. The answer is still always no, eternally no.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I say almost nothing, almost all the time. Obviously, I recognize, in a grander sense, that I have a tendency to alienate myself and blow things out of proportion, and that these women are basically guiltless from a certain perspective.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“There’s a nightmare familiarity every morning when I wake. The quality of the light, sort of grayish‑dim, the stiff feeling of my body, the smell, part dirty clothing, part cooking oil, part garbage, part incense. I’m reminded of how afraid I am to die, and how every morning is just one more used‑up day.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I cry for a second, but I’m faking it. Waaaaaaahhhhhh. Poor me, poor me, who cares. This is what I wanted. To sit here and not have someone judging me. I’m fat, I smell, no one likes me, my clothes suck, I’ll never amount to anything, everyone around me is an idiot, self‑involved, judgmental, stupid, too dumb to know the harm they’re doing, too dumb to know they’re not happy inside, not like me, I know. Ha‑ha‑ha.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I could have friends if I had more money. I could be easier to get along with if I had more stability. If I had a real job, it might come with more responsibilities. I guess I’ve been wanting those. I could be who I wanted to be—calm, cool, self-assured, self-reliant, independent enough to attract people who could enjoy my company because we’re all independent people doing what we have to do to get by.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“It’s like sucking on a rock and pretending it’s candy, talking to this guy.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“Suddenly it was like, Okay, what the fuck now? I went to fucking dinner and here I am again in my stupid little room, guess I’ll sit on the couch and think about my stupid life.”
― Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare

“I go with the same intentions as most-to find a person who might realize, through a sympathy of dialogue, that I am the person they've been looking for to fulfill what's been missing in their emotional and intellectual lives.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“My dreams are superficial and related to home improvement. There’s a slight feeling of dread to them all.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“TV in general messes with your perception of time and influences your desires and gives you unattainable expectations for life, but I still can't make it through the night without it.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“She shuffles the papers and sighs, trying to make my job seem more important, so that her overseeing of my job seem more important.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“I note this woman’s shape-shifting performance. How by saying a thing, she becomes it. As she complains about how boring it is to hear her friend complain about her mother, as she goes into detail, masterfully reenacting specific boring conversations (both between her and her friend, and her friend and her friend’s mother), she is essentially becoming them both, becoming the boredom she claims to want to remove from her life and mind, but which have complete control of her, and she doesn’t notice that by saying “I don’t like this” over and over she is just drawing herself closer to it, essentially becoming her friend and subjecting us all to what she claims to hate.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“You know?" she whispered. "You know?" She whispered it while she looked at the palms of her hands and walked back to her apartment in the apocalyptic green light, wondering what she could do to convince people that she was crazy (therefore a victim) and not an asshole (therefore just an asshole).”
― Halle Butler, Jillian