Top 60 Paul Tremblay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “It was so dark it was like noting was there in the room but us. Only the nothing was actually something because it filled my eyes and lungs and it sat on my shoulders.”

— Paul Tremblay

5. “Maybe the people who go away are the ones who are not afraid, not sad, and not alone. Maybe there’s a place where they gather and say things like What is to be done with all the silly people we left behind?”

— Paul Tremblay

6. “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

7. “Are you good at keeping secrets, Merry?” “I’m better than some.” I pause, then add, “More often than not, they keep me,” only because it sounds simultaneously mysterious and pithy.”

— Paul Tremblay

8. “She kept talking and she kept talking. I thought she would never stop. Standing there, I felt the sun pour through the windows, setting and rising on my back. The sunroom had become a sundial measuring the geological age of my psychological toture.”

— Paul Tremblay

9. “You can find the molasses flood on the Internet, it’s there, I checked. Most of it is there, anyway, but that’s not where I heard it.” “Where, then?” She.”

— Paul Tremblay

10. “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

11. “Father Wanderly, have you seen a demon or evil spirit actually leave the body? What did it look like? Could you see anything? Did you see a wisp, like smoke over a campfire? Does the demon get sucked into a void, clutching on to the old, possessed body like a life raft? Or does it go quietly, like a child leaving her parents’ home for the final time? If you couldn’t see anything, if the spirit was invisible, then how could you know if the exorcism really, truly worked?”

— Paul Tremblay

12. “Passage of time as a prop to the story, the story that has been told and retold so often it has lost its meaning, even to those of us who lived through it.”

— Paul Tremblay

13. “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

14. “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

15. “The charging indicator light on the camera was still red.”

— Paul Tremblay

16. “I tried to scream for help but I couldn’t move my mouth and I couldn’t breathe and everything in me just started leaking away, running down, like my volume button being turned down slowly. I knew I was dying, that that was what dying felt like, and the worst part was that the terrible horrible dying feeling was going to last forever. I’d never fully run out so the feeling would never stop.”

— Paul Tremblay

17. “On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.”

— Paul Tremblay

18. “Sometimes it’s good to be sad, Merry. Don’t forget that.”

— Paul Tremblay

19. “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

20. “You know, I never realized the end of the world would be kept to such a tight, regimented TV Guide schedule.”

— Paul Tremblay

21. “See The Last Exorcism. But don’t see its dumbass ending.”

— Paul Tremblay

22. “And, to be honest, my social anxiety was one of the reasons why I had decided to stop frequenting conventions and readings, with finances being another reason, and yet another, the notion that I could prevent the inexorable untethering from Dominick if I remained geographically fixed within the Hudson Valley at all times, like an old stone fence in a forgotten stretch of woods.”

— Paul Tremblay

23. “I’m like a friend admitting some reprehensible bit of behavior that forever warps and taints the relationship. Only I’m not a friend. I think I understand her obvious discomfort. Strangers are supposed to lie.”

— Paul Tremblay

24. “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

25. “They can’t. They’ve been changed. There’s no going back. This is the fallacy of the good old days: not only are they gone and never coming back, they never existed in the first place. That’s the horror of existence. Change happens whether you want it to or not. Existence is by its very nature progressive. It continually asks, So now what? How are you going to live through this? How is anyone going to live through this?”

— Paul Tremblay

26. “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

27. “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

28. “I had a brief runaway fantasy where I ran away to California, which I’d never been to, to where all the Bigfoots were, and I’d disappear into the woods and live alone, become a rumor, an occasional blurred sighting. Father.”

— Paul Tremblay

29. “Now there’s only me and everything else is on the periphery, just slightly out of reach or out of touch or out of time.”

— Paul Tremblay

30. “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

31. “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?”

— Paul Tremblay

32. “Go ahead, say it. Crazy. Right? Your daughter was going crazy. So why not stop at church? Makes perfect sense to me.” “Marjorie.”

— Paul Tremblay

33. “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

34. “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

35. “He’ll be doomed to say sorry for eternity and no one will listen and no one will believe him.”

— Paul Tremblay

36. “Actually, I’m possessed, only I’m possessed by something so much older and cooler than Satan.”

— Paul Tremblay

37. “Elizabeth actively despises the landline’s inefficiency in regard to their everyday lives. The only calls the phone receives are credit card offers, scam vacation prizes, charities and fringe political groups looking for money, and the occasional mass recorded message from the town of Ames broadcasting the closing of school during snowstorms. When the kids were little, Elizabeth wanted to keep the landline so that they’d be able to dial 911 should “anything bad happen.” That was the phrase.”

— Paul Tremblay

38. “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

39. “Now I’m thinking about letters, the molecules of sentences and songs, the bricks of words.”

— Paul Tremblay

40. “So heaven was this vague, uneasy, almost cartoonish concept, a confusing cultural mash up of puffy clouds, harps, winged Angel’s, Golden sunlight, a giant hand that may or may not belong to a giant man with a flowing white beard named God.”

— Paul Tremblay

41. “Just because you have a scar doesn’t mean you have something wrong with you, Wen.”

— Paul Tremblay

42. “Red slashes and gouges colored her skin. They crossed and looped and overlapped, like someone was trying to scribble her out, as though she were a mistake. Marjorie.”

— Paul Tremblay

43. “But ghosts aren’t white and bright. Ghosts are shadows of someone or something gone wrong.”

— Paul Tremblay

44. “That’s the true power of story. That it can find the secrets both writer and reader didn’t know they had within themselves.”

— Paul Tremblay

45. “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

46. “The TV people. I like calling them that. The TV people. And they have TVs for heads and their faces can change when the channels change.”

— Paul Tremblay

47. “Her black hair was a dead octopus leaking and sliding off her scalp.”

— Paul Tremblay

48. “I’ll never have kids but if I were suddenly and inexplicably cursed to be a mother, I solemnly swear to answer any questions my child might have, tell my child everything, and to not withhold even one single nasty detail.”

— Paul Tremblay

49. “I remember this lunch in great detail because I remember it as being the last time he was happy-Dad with me.”

— Paul Tremblay

50. “After your performed the exorcism, how did you know that demon wasn’t still in there, hiding? How do you know it didn’t go in a hibernation state, quieting down to come out later, years and years later when no one would be around to help? Hey, how do you know if the wrong spirit left? What if you expelled the person’s real spirit and only the demon’s spirit was there to take its place? If I believed in any of that stuff, I’d be afraid that was going to happen to me.”

— Paul Tremblay