I have about 400 lines, but each print is spitting out all the lines at once. tried everything including manually adding carriage returns in text editor.

[edit] attached patch

[40\
|
[goto $1, this(
| [read list.txt(
| /
| /
[msgfile]
|
[print]

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/example.pd

Each line should end in a semicolon to separate them, not a carriage return. If you have carriage returns instead of semicolons in the file, you can load it using the cr option:

[read <filename> cr(

This will treat the carriage returns as semicolons.

gotcha.

geez. why isn't this documented in the help? or is it an obvious formatting scheme that i simply wasn't aware of?

It is documented in the help, it's just not well-documented. The message itself is in [pd file-i/o] in the [msgfile] helpfile, but that helpfile is pretty sparse. There's more info in the [textfile] and [qlist] helpfiles.