Netflix’s Wednesday didn’t just revive a classic character.
It turned Wednesday Addams’ one‑liners into a whole online language of their own.
When Season 1 dropped on November 23, 2022, the series immediately broke records. Netflix logged 341 million viewing hours in its first week, the highest ever for an English‑language show at the time, edging past Stranger Things 4. Nielsen measured roughly 6 billion minutes viewed in that same window, one of the biggest streaming weeks it had ever tracked. By December 2022, Wednesday had reached around 150 million Netflix households and about 1 billion viewing hours overall.
Those numbers explain why Wednesday’s deadpan comebacks and bleak little jokes now float across Instagram captions, X threads, and TikTok edits. By August 2025, a GamesRadar analysis still ranked Season 1 as Netflix’s most‑watched English‑language season with 252.1 million total views, second only to Squid Game globally. Season 2, released in two parts in August and September 2025, only renewed interest in the character’s voice.
Below, we dig into the sharpest Wednesday Addams quotes from the Netflix era, what they say about her, and why they stuck. All of them come from documented lists, interviews, and coverage between 2022 and late 2025, with clear references to when and how they appeared.
Why Wednesday’s voice hits so hard
Before getting to the lines themselves, it helps to understand how deliberately this version of Wednesday was built.
The series, created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, leans into Netflix’s official logline: Wednesday is “smart, sarcastic and a little dead inside.” Tim Burton serves as an executive producer and directed several Season 1 episodes, helping shape the show’s mix of teen drama, horror, and grim comedy at Nevermore Academy.
Jenna Ortega, who plays Wednesday, has said in Netflix’s own Tudum interview that she already had “a very dry” and sometimes “too dark” sense of humor. Friends and colleagues had been comparing her to Wednesday for years. She also described the role as “freeing” because the character “sticks to her guns” and never tries to please anyone.
Critics picked up the same idea. The Rotten Tomatoes critics’ consensus argued that without Ortega, Wednesday might feel like just another CW‑style teen show. A Detroit‑based review praised her “elastic” deadpan, saying she kept Wednesday from becoming a flat stereotype.
So when we talk about “Wednesday Addams quotes” from this era, we are really talking about a tight collaboration: the writers’ morbid wit, Ortega’s bone‑dry delivery, and Burton’s gothic framing. Together, they built a voice that feels both familiar and oddly current.
“A soul‑sucking void”: Wednesday vs. social media
Few lines captured the internet’s attention like her attack on the thing that powers it.
Early in Season 1, when her roommate Enid pushes Instagram and TikTok, Wednesday replies:
- “I find social media to be a soul‑sucking void of meaningless affirmation.”
IMDb and several quote databases list this line under Episode 1, and clips of the moment have circulated widely since late 2022. A parenting campaign against smartphones even used it in a 2023 video about delaying kids’ social media use.
The joke lands because Wednesday sounds like the only person in the room not chasing likes. In a show that owes much of its success to memes and TikTok edits, the main character calling social media a “soul‑sucking void” is almost self‑mocking. It also helps explain why her quotes travel so far. They feel like commentary from someone standing just outside the internet, watching the rest of us scroll.
By Season 2, that idea has evolved into even bleaker jokes. Promotional materials and coverage highlighted a doomscrolling gag built around the line “Why face reality when you can doomscroll into sweet oblivion?” It is the same disdain, now adjusted for an audience that has spent years staring at bad news feeds.
“The only person who gets to torture my brother is me”
For all the spikes and threats, Wednesday’s best quotes often reveal loyalty underneath.
One early fan‑favorite line comes when she stands up for Pugsley:
- “The only person who gets to torture my brother is me.”
This appears repeatedly in quote lists for Season 1, and it reads like a mission statement for her version of family values. Violence is a love language in the Addams household, but it is still a private one. Outsiders do not get to participate.
The writers return to that same mix of loyalty and menace in several other lines:
- “I don’t bury hatchets. I sharpen them.”
- “I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I believe in revenge.”
Both quotes show up in English‑language databases that collected Wednesday’s dialogue after Season 1. They are not gentle, but they are consistent. Wednesday sees grudges as tools, and she is happy to say so in plain language.
This is where the “a little dead inside” tag from Netflix’s description becomes more than a joke. She feels things deeply, but she would rather express it as weapon maintenance than emotional confession.
High school as “teenage purgatory”
Another reason Wednesday’s dialogue hit Gen Z so quickly is how frankly she talks about school and adolescent life.
Early in her time at Nevermore, Wednesday surveys the campus and declares:
- “Our first order of business is to escape this teenage purgatory.”
Collider and other entertainment sites included that line in lists of her “most relatable” quotes. It gave fans a neat phrase for the feeling of being stuck in hallways, cafeterias, and cliques.
Other lines in the same lane, gathered in fan blogs, include variations on:
- “I’m not interested in participating in tribal adolescent clichés.”
All of these pair well with the visual from Season 1 that might be even more famous than any quote: the Rave’N dance. That black‑and‑white sequence, set to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” went viral on TikTok, spawned countless recreations, and even led to Mezco Toyz releasing a “Dancing Wednesday” doll in 2024.
The dance and the dialogue tell the same story. Wednesday refuses to move, dress, or speak like everyone else at school, and she is funnier for it.
“Traits of great writers… and serial killers”
One of the most distinct things about the Netflix version of Wednesday is how much she talks about writing. She is not just a gloomy teen. She is a working novelist in progress.
A widely cited line from Season 1 has her confess:
- “I know I’m stubborn, single‑minded, and obsessive. Traits of great writers… and serial killers.”
Blog round‑ups in 2024 and 2025 regularly highlight that sentence as one of the best windows into her mind. She is completely aware that her personality can tilt either toward art or toward violence, and she likes the ambiguity.
Season 2 leans even harder into the “goth girl who writes” identity. A September 2025 People / Yahoo feature on “best brooding Wednesday quotes” pulled several new lines about creativity, including:
- “Writers should always refill their creative cups… I indulged in my favorite passions, torment and humiliation.”
- “I only sign my name in blood. I never said it was my own blood.”
These lines keep the same pattern. Wednesday takes a normal creative cliché, then twists it with a macabre detail. Refill your cup, yes, but with other people’s pain. Sign your work, sure, but explain nothing about whose blood is involved.
It is a method that helps her stand out even within a crowded field of “relatable” TV teens. Where other shows might offer generic inspirational monologues about self‑expression, Wednesday gives a cold, precise joke about forged blood signatures instead.
“Use the words ‘little’ and ‘girl’ again…”
The series also arms Wednesday with some of its sharpest responses to condescension and gendered language.
One compact example, cataloged in multiple quote databases, has become a go‑to line in online debates:
- “Use the words ‘little’ and ‘girl’ to address me again and I can’t guarantee your safety.”
It is funny, but not entirely. The threat feels real enough that the room goes quiet. That is part of her appeal. Wednesday is not just refusing a nickname. She is refusing an entire way of being spoken down to.
The same spine shows up in other short lines:
- “My personal philosophy is kill or be killed.”
- “Every day is about me. This one just comes with cake and a bad song.”
The birthday line, in particular, became a meme format by 2023, used in posts from people who hate parties but still like attention. It sums up Wednesday’s whole stance in thirteen words. She is not shy. She just reserves the right to hate the rituals built around her.
“Fear of being included”: the Season 2 evolution
By the time Season 2 hit Netflix in August and September 2025, Wednesday had already become a shorthand for being antisocial and unbothered. The new episodes had to sharpen that image without turning it into a parody of itself.
Early coverage suggests the writers leaned into it rather than backing off. A Yahoo / People list of new quotes identifies several that take her loner status to joke‑book levels:
- “I have FOBI. Fear of being included.”
- “I’m where fun goes to die.”
Both are compact and extremely shareable. They also match broader reporting about Season 2’s tone. Outlets like Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan noted that the new season leans less on romance and more on horror and mystery, giving Wednesday more room to be a self‑declared killjoy.
Other Season 2 lines shift her from moody teen toward full antihero:
- “Some people wrestle with darkness. I love shadows. That’s where I do my best stalking.”
- “You thought I was your hero? I’m not. I always play dirty, and I never fight fair… The only side I’m on is my own.”
Those sentences, highlighted again in the 2025 best‑quotes lists, reflect a show more willing to acknowledge how dangerous its lead really is. In Season 1, Wednesday’s darkness often played as a contrast to the world around her. In Season 2, with bigger stakes and “evolving psychic powers,” as one schedule guide put it, the writing brings her closer to a true villain who just happens to be our protagonist.
Even so, the tone stays playful enough to work on social media. The stalking line, for example, has already been used in TikTok edits over footage of people just quietly people‑watching at cafés.
Crime scenes and coffins: humor as worldview
A thread runs through almost all the quotes that surfaced in 2025 coverage. Wednesday keeps treating homicide vocabulary as everyday language.
Several new lines from Season 2 drive that point home:
- “Nothing like a bad pun to throw dirt on the coffin of epic poetry.”
- “Like returning to the scene of the crime. I already know where the bodies are buried.”
- “Funerals are a hobby.”
- “If you can’t kill them with kindness, try lethal injection.”
Each one is a miniature joke about death, writers’ workshops, or petty grudges. Together, they form a complete worldview. For Wednesday, the best way to say anything is to bury it in crime‑scene metaphors.
That consistency is one reason the character’s voice cuts through so clearly in the age of quote lists. Many shows have strong scripts, but not many give their lead a vocabulary this tightly defined. Whether she is talking about school, birthdays, or poetry, Wednesday finds a way to connect it back to knives, graves, or blood.
It also helps that Ortega’s own comments about horror and sarcasm line up almost perfectly with the role. In a magazine interview, she mentioned loving gore and being “pretty deadpan” in real life. That real‑world overlap probably makes the lines feel even more convincing on screen.
What happens next for Wednesday’s one‑liners
The quotes in this piece come from just two seasons and a handful of promotional clips, but Netflix is not done yet.
Season 2 finished its rollout on September 3, 2025, with eight total episodes split across two dates. Within its first tracking week, Part 1 delivered about 50 million views, just a hair below Season 1’s comparable window at 50.1 million, according to GamesRadar’s breakdown of Netflix data. For a character first introduced in 1938 newspaper cartoons, that is an impressive modern audience.
Netflix has already ordered a third season. Co‑creators Gough and Millar have promised a faster production cycle this time, after the nearly three‑year gap caused partly by strikes and heavy visual‑effects demands between Seasons 1 and 2. Separately, Entertainment Weekly reported in 2025 that a spinoff focused on Uncle Fester, played by Fred Armisen, is in early development.
All that means Wednesday’s voice is not going anywhere.
More mysteries, more funerals, more grim punchlines.
For now, though, the lines that have already surfaced give a pretty complete picture. She is the girl who calls Instagram a “soul‑sucking void,” treats funerals as a hobby, and happily reminds anyone who forgets that the only side she is on is her own.
Whether you are using them as captions, reaction posts, or just saving them in a notes app for later, these Wednesday Addams quotes are not just jokes from a hit show. They are the clearest expression of a character who has survived comics, TV, movies, and now streaming dominance, all while sharpening the same hatchet.
