Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But there’s always been an unspoken agreement that we have to keep coming, no matter what, because this is the only consistent, dependable thing in Heather’s life.”

— Grady Hendrix

2. “Life doesn’t care what you want, other people don’t care what you want. All that matters is what you do.”

— Grady Hendrix

3. “Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.”

— Grady Hendrix

4. “You say tomato and I say shamanistic vision quest that uses an ordeal to lead us inward on a journey of spiritual discovery and eventual synthesis and peace.”

— Grady Hendrix

5. “You have a smile like fire and eyes like thunder, and you make servants kill their masters and children kill their parents. You are the devourer of stars, the destroyer of time, the rash solution, the cleaving that can never be rejoined, giver of dooming rage.”

— Grady Hendrix

6. “Hard rock, heavy metal, stoner rock, doom metal-it all dragged itself up out of the swamp called the blues.”

— Grady Hendrix

7. “Gated communities let you choose your neighbors so the people around you are the kind of people you want around your children. By the time this century is over I expect just about everyone will live in a gated community.”

— Grady Hendrix

8. “But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”?”

— Grady Hendrix

9. “Does this ever end? Will there always be someone out there turning little boys into monsters? Will we always be final girls? Will there always be monsters killing us? How do we stop the snake from eating its own tail?”

— Grady Hendrix

10. “There’s nothing waiting inside but retail slavery, endless exploitation, and personal subjugation to the whims of our corporate overlords.” If.”

— Grady Hendrix

11. “She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?”

— Grady Hendrix

12. “Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel.”

— Grady Hendrix

13. “I love you, Gretchen Lang. You are my reflection and my shadow and I will not let you go. We are bound together forever and ever! Until Halley’s Comet comes around again. I love you dearly and I love you queerly and no demon is bigger than this!”

— Grady Hendrix

14. “A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one. But if you’re happy just doing what you’re told and reading what other people think you should read, then don’t let me stop you. I just find it sad.”

— Grady Hendrix

15. “By the power of Phil Collins, I rebuke you!” she said. “By the power of Phil Collins, who knows that you coming back to me is against all odds, in his name I command you to leave this servant of Genesis alone.”

— Grady Hendrix

16. “The more Amy struggled, the faster she sank. Every month she shuffled around less and less money to cover the same number of bills. The hamster wheel kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Sometimes she wanted to let go and find out exactly how far she’d fall if she just stopped fighting. She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?”

— Grady Hendrix

17. “I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.”

— Grady Hendrix

18. “Wasting food is no joke!” he’d shout. “That’s how Karen Carpenter died!”

— Grady Hendrix

19. “When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.”

— Grady Hendrix

20. “Abby and Gretchen still kept up, but it was phone calls and letters, then postcards and voicemail, and finally emails and Facebook likes. There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.”

— Grady Hendrix

21. “West Virginia was a haunted house. Grocery stores sat dark, empty diners stared out from blank windows, farmhouses collapsed beside the highway like rotten teeth.”

— Grady Hendrix

22. “A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.”

— Grady Hendrix

23. “She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.”

— Grady Hendrix

24. “In the center of the Minotaur’s labyrinth lies something precious: monstrous knowledge. Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses.”

— Grady Hendrix

25. “It was the voice of a preacher, a voice of the past, a voice for cathedrals, a voice from a time before microphones. It was a voice that denounced witches and flogged sinners. It was a voice that sang Latin while women burned at the stake and men were crushed beneath stones.”

— Grady Hendrix

26. “Pain is a four letter word the weak use to get out of doing what must be done.”

— Grady Hendrix

27. “A no-good man will tell you he’s going to change,” she said. “He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, but you’re the fool if you don’t believe what you see.”

— Grady Hendrix

28. “There are enough people running around in here. It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

— Grady Hendrix

29. “Grace was right: it made no sense, but sometimes you did a thing because that was just what you did, not because it was sensible.”

— Grady Hendrix

30. “It’s complicated. But pain and fear have a way of simplifying things.”

— Grady Hendrix

31. “Corn dogs,” the exorcist said, “are all the proof I need that there is a God.”

— Grady Hendrix

32. “Kris had been alive long enough to know it was dangerous when men accused you of being better than them.”

— Grady Hendrix

33. “Something I learned from the Serbian tribes. Churches are built where saints were martyred. A bridge requires a child in its foundations if it is to hold. All great works must begin with a sacrifice.”

— Grady Hendrix

34. “We’re a book club,” Maryellen said. “What are we supposed to do? Read him to death? Use strong language?”

— Grady Hendrix

35. “Of course, every mother thinks her baby is perfect, but at some point, as her home fills with dead bodies, she has to face facts and admit that the fruit of her womb is a face-eating beast spawned from the deepest recesses of hell.”

— Grady Hendrix

36. “I think,” Grace said, and they sat up straighter, “that it shows a remarkable lack of planning on Betty’s part. If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.”

— Grady Hendrix

37. “Let’s make sure it’s really raining before we worry about floods.”

— Grady Hendrix

38. “Being a teenager isn’t a number, ” Maryellen said. “It’s the age when you stop liking them.”

— Grady Hendrix

39. “We’re getting out of here,” she said. “The store will try to stop us. It’ll disorient you, get inside your head, try to confuse you and control you. But if you stay focused, you can block it out. You have to fight, do you understand?”

— Grady Hendrix

40. “A song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

— Grady Hendrix

41. “Mark gone, Pupkin now,” Pupkin screeched.”

— Grady Hendrix

42. “Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”

— Grady Hendrix

43. “It’s April 1988 and the world belongs to them.”

— Grady Hendrix

44. “All great works must begin with a sacrifice.”

— Grady Hendrix

45. “Magicians think they’re wise and witty, full of patter and panache, walking around like they don’t deserve to be shot in the back of the head and dumped in a lake. For all the grandeur of its self-regard, magic consists of nothing more than making a total stranger feel stupid. Worse, the magician usually dresses like a jackass”.”

— Grady Hendrix

46. “For her, the world was divided into two kinds of jobs: those where you had to stand up, and those where you could sit down. If you were standing up, you were paid hourly. If you were sitting down, you were salaried.”

— Grady Hendrix

47. “That was her nature. Fail and quit. If you cut her open, it was fail and quit right down to her bones.”

— Grady Hendrix

48. “These false prophets come wandering into town, take hold of your mind, and lead you down a primrose path... People fall for honeyed words.”

— Grady Hendrix

49. “The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane.”

— Grady Hendrix

50. “Work gives you a goal. It lets you build something that lives on after you’re gone. Work has a purpose beyond making money.”

— Grady Hendrix