Top 100 Stephen Graham Jones Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “What I was doing was making deals. With the world. I’ll take care of you, you take care of me, cool?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

52. “Lewis finds the fourteen-foot aluminum ladder under boxes in the garage, Three Stooges in into the backyard...”

— Stephen Graham Jones

53. “And it’s not just Freddy to watch for in a place like this. Wishmaster could step into the passage between the two cells, use his drug dealer voice to ask her if she’d like to walk through these solid bars to freedom, and if Jade was tired enough, she might not remember to word this wish with utmost care, and end up being pulled like taffy through the steel bars. No thank you.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

54. “This is the part in the movie where Jade’s supposed to rally, she knows. She’s not supposed to mope, she’s supposed to be gearing up, pouring black powder into lightbulbs, hammering nails into the business end of a bat, that kind of stuff.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

55. “We all become history at some point, right?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

56. “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

57. “She’s got some Cross Guns in her veins, too. What this means, Gabe knows, it’s that she’s going to reach an age where she’ll want to take the world in her teeth and shake until she tears a hunk of something off for herself. And then, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s a scholarship or a five-year bid in state or two kids in as many years, she’ll sit in the corner by herself and chew it down, dare anybody to say this isn’t exactly what she wanted.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

58. “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

59. “Only stupid Indians brush past a bunch of hard-handed white dudes, each of them sure that seat you had in the bar, it should have, by right, been theirs. They’re cool with the Chief among them being the chain monkey, but when it comes down to who has an eyeline on the white woman, well, that’s another thing altogether, isn’t it?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

60. “Some girls just don’t know how to die.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

61. “Jade would never kill anyone just because. With reason, though, yeah. Twice-over, with interest, and more than a little attitude, maybe even something a little extra, for style points.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

62. “Dealing with cops is like being around a skittish horse: No sudden movements, nothing shiny or loud. Zero jokes.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

63. “You said this place was haunted,” Shooting Glasses tells her. “By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside,” Jade says.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

64. “When there are no more frontiers you make your own.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

65. “Some games, you are Reggie Miller. And, if you’re really good, you’re maybe even Cheryl.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

66. “White girls know the names of everything.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

67. “Can’t I just like horror because it’s great? Does there have to be some big explanation?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

68. “Fine. I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

69. “Shanna was the first to go. And by “go” I mean die. And by “die” I mean get killed.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

70. “Isn’t that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

71. “It’s from George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

72. “It’s less about survival, more about who you’re holding when that big irradiated shockwave blows you to ash.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

73. “It’s Jade, sir,” Jade says back, and breathes all the corruption in her lungs out. Well, not the blackness, she supposes. Not the horror. Never that.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

74. “There’s final girls everywhere, aren’t there? I used to think they were the rarest breed, the finest vintage. But everyone who’s got something to fight for, they’ll fight for it, never mind if it’s a fight they should win. ‘Should’ doesn’t always matter. What does is that you run screaming into this thing, and don’t stop until it’s over.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

75. “Because of that, the buzz and whisper is different. Both more hushed and more thrilled, like a formation of Oprah Winfreys are about to parachute down through the clouds, giving cars out to you, and you, and also you.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

76. “I didn’t mean to name that buffalo calf that, but once I said it I couldn’t take it back. But Wolf Calf told me when I was young that a real Pikuni gives away what’s closest to him, and my childhood name was the one thing the Cat Man and the soldiers hadn’t been able to touch. So I had to give it away.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

77. “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

78. “It’s six minutes of my life, tops, but some memories you don’t measure in minutes or miles, but by how much of yourself is still in that moment.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

79. “Got some red on me, yeah,” she kind-of-quotes, shrugging his inspection off, all the tiny scars up and down her thighs and hips crawling over themselves to be seen.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

80. “Jade pats her pocket for the second sandwich she knows is just as gone as the first. It’s less actually looking for it, more showing the world that she’s hungry, that it can deliver her some nuggets or a burrito or fishsticks if it wants. She won’t tell anybody.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

81. “But you also remember the first time you saw your final girl in her true light, and how your vision tunneled down, your mind pulsing her, her, her.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

82. “Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

83. “We all want to hide, don’t we? To not have to be constantly navigating between our true self and people’s expectations twenty-four seven?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

84. “But, really, I just like horror. Not everything has some dark reason behind it.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

85. “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

86. “He didn’t so much get there as just never leave.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

87. “And if any of them knew horror, they’d know you let the dead rest.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

88. “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

89. “Moms are so oblivious. It’s like they live in a bubble of wishful thinking.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

90. “Maybe this is how it happens after high school, right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over. You just drift away, and then it gets easier not to call, and then you forget the number, and then you see your old friend in line for the movie or whatever and you let your eyes keep moving, because it’s going to be awkward now.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

91. “Is it really winning if everybody dies?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

92. “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

93. “The pages gather in his left hand, thin out in his right.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

94. “I didn’t look around, though. You can’t look around, every time you think you’re not alone. Once you start, you never stop.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

95. “Probably to the filthy rich, toilets are disposable. Mario and Luigi are always standing by to switch a new one in after each use.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

96. “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

97. “Jerry says Lewis shouldn’t hold it against Harley. He didn’t know what he was doing. When the whole world hurts, you bite it, don’t you?”

— Stephen Graham Jones

98. “Weasel Plume. I never knew you, but God do I miss you.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

99. “It flew above the Bear the day they killed Heavy Runner,” Good Stab said back without pause. “It flies above every camp of dead Indians. I will always pull them down. 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

100. “It’s stupid being superstitious like that, he knows, but if you don’t have private little rituals, the days can lose their meaning real fast.”

— Stephen Graham Jones