Stephen Graham Jones > Quotes

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“This is all you really need, isn’t it? Just one good friend. Somebody you can be stupid with. Somebody who’ll peel you up off the ground, prop you against the wall.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“Horror's not a symptom, it's a love affair.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“We’re from where we’re from,” she says back. “Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” I said, calmer again. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you’re the one who starts it.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“What he didn't say was that you don't get cold-resistant because your jackets suck, you just stop complaining about it after a while, because complaining doesn't make you any warmer.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“The land claims what you leave behind.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“When the whole world hurts, you bite it. Don't you?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“Some girls just don't know how to die.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“An elk mother, cornered, will slash with her hooves and tear with her mouth and even offer the hope of her own hamstrings, and if none of that works, she'll rise again years and years later, because it's never over, it's always just beginning again.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“If you’re not a beautiful monster, then you’re a villager,”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels: A Gripping Horror Coming-of-Age Story About a Boy and His Werewolf Family

“Good Stab fell to his knees, pressed his forehead to the floor and he screamed too, and I daresay our screams harmonized, at least in how much they pained us.

This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“It's soft at the end. Not just the pain, but the world.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“The depravity of man's heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they're trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Don't Fear the Reaper

“These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“I'm all right," I told her. This is a lie, when you're twelve. And all the other years, too.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Mapping the Interior

“For them, ten years ago, that's another lifetime.
For you, it's yesterday.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“And, if I'm to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps because it knows more than you do--knows that, past this experience, a whole new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt with one by one.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Ones That Got Away

“Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

“It’s almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church’s holy days?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in a scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw

“You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Mapping the Interior

“Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl. But, that’s just it, isn’t it? They were plural, not singular, that’s where horror movies have it all wrong, that’s where the slasher lies: it’s not about a lone girl carving her way to daylight, is it? It’s about two girls making it across the ice together.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Don't Fear the Reaper

“Sometimes you just know what you're doing is the only thing to be doing. That the world is conspiring all around you to make it happen, like, not just giving you permission, but herding you the direction you need to go, giving you secret nods and obvious hand signals, and getting everything out of the way so you have the clearest path possible.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, Night of the Mannequins

“You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“She’s a gorehound, a horror fiend, the more brutal the better, bring it on, faster, pussycat, kill kill kill, but that’s all on-screen. And at some level she never forgets that all the blood’s corn syrup.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw