Paul Tremblay > Quotes

“Ideas. I'm possessed by ideas. Ideas that are as old as humanity, maybe older, right? Maybe those ideas were out there just floating around before us, just waiting to be thought up. Maybe we don't think them, we pluck them out from another dimension or another mind.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Hope is a desperate man's currency.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Little Sleep

“No matter how bleak or dire, end-of-the-world scenarios appeal to us because we take meaning from the end... there's also undeniable allure to witnessing the beginning of the end and perishing alone with everyone and everything else.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“Being asked to read another writer’s rough draft is the literary equivalent of being asked to help a friend move a couch to a new place.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Sometimes it's good to be sad, Merry. Don't forget that.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Too many people have smiles that don’t mean what a smile is supposed to mean. Their smiles are often cruel and mocking, like how a bully’s grin is the same as a fist.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“Not all gifts are easy to accept. The most important gifts are often the ones we wish with all our hearts to refuse.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“A movie is a collection of beautiful lies that somehow add up to being the truth, or a truth.”
― Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie

“But ghosts aren't white and bright. Ghosts are shadows of someone or something gone wrong.”
― Paul Tremblay, Disappearance at Devil's Rock

“There’s nothing wrong with me, Merry. Only my bones want to grow through my skin like the growing things and pierce the world.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“The mask is ugly and grotesque and familiar, and we cannot stop staring at it because all monsters are mirrors.”
― Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie

“Being lost isn't the same as being nowhere. Being lost is worse because there's the false hope that you might be found.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Little Sleep

“To be honest, and all the external influences aside, there are some parts of this that I remember in great, terrible detail, so much so I fear getting lost in the labyrinth of memory. There are other parts of this that remain as unclear and unknowable as someone else’s mind, and I fear that in my head I’ve likely conflated and compressed timelines and events.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Actually, I'm possessed, only I'm possessed by something so much older and cooler than Satan.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“All cats are assholes. It’s what makes them so cool.” “True.”
― Paul Tremblay, Disappearance at Devil's Rock

“The cabin is now a haunted house, baptized by yesterday’s violence,”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“They share another long look. This one is reserved for ill-fated observers in the moments before impending, inescapable calamity, whether it be natural disaster or violent failure of humanity; a look of resigned melancholy and awe, unblinking in the face of a revealed, horrific, sacred truth. And they realize again, in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“He’d irrationally hoped he could somehow put off indefinitely the future day on which she would recognize cruelty, ignorance, and injustice were the struts and pillars of the social order, as unavoidable and inevitable as the weather.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“the final tally of what will be considered the end of the epidemic [but not, to be clear, the end of the virus; it will burrow, digging in like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem], almost ten thousand people will have died. *”
― Paul Tremblay, Survivor Song

“I wasn't sure if I wanted to hear such a big secret. It might not fit in my head and then it would spill out everywhere.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“I am the dead dreamer, older than sin, older than humanity. I am the shadow below everything. I am the beautiful thing that awaits us all.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“To forget is to lose something that was once yours, that was once of yourself. But how could one lose something as expansive as an ocean in a dusty corner of one’s mind? What if, instead, to forget is to open a door to a void; the memory is not retrievable because it is not there, was never there.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Last Conversation

“He’s probably seen that horrible Johnny Depp version of the movie. That you kids like it and not the original Gene Wilder version is sacrilege.” “Mom,”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“Trust the process. Dumbly believe things are how they’re supposed to be and that they will work out simply because of that belief, even if you know better.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“You know, I never realized the end of the world would be kept to such a tight, regimented TV Guide schedule.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Cabin at the End of the World

“I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won't save anyone.”
― Paul Tremblay, No Sleep Till Wonderland

“See The Last Exorcism. But don’t see its dumbass ending.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“I sneak into your room when you are asleep, Merry-monkey. I’ve been doing it for weeks now, since the end of summer. You’re so pretty when you’re asleep. Last night, I pinched your nose shut until you opened your little mouth”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“As one of my favorite foul-mouthed lit professors used to say, “Man, that’s some fucked-up shit right there.”
― Paul Tremblay, Growing Things And Other Stories