Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one.”

— Grady Hendrix

52. “Dogs are good and often form armies to assist humans fighting Satan, whereas cats can go either way.”

— Grady Hendrix

53. “The devil is loud and brash and full of drama. God, He’s like a sparrow.”

— Grady Hendrix

54. “By the power of Phil Collins, I rebuke you!”

— Grady Hendrix

55. “Everyone’s hungry for our children,” she said, and her voice cracked. “The whole world wants to gobble up colored children and no matter how many it takes it just licks its lips and wants more.”

— Grady Hendrix

56. “The line between being too careful and not being careful enough is a line you only get to cross once.”

— Grady Hendrix

57. “Amy would honor the first commandment of keeping her job: Do not look like an idiot in front of anyone who can fire you.”

— Grady Hendrix

58. “Even after everything that came later, when everything in her life hurt, the memory of those nights wrapped her in a soft, sweet glow that often carried her away to sleep.”

— Grady Hendrix

59. “Did y’all do those earth science questions?” “Igneous rock, Trey,” Gretchen said. “It’s always igneous rock.”

— Grady Hendrix

60. “Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female. Look at Adrienne. No, look at their shoes. Memorize their faces, their clothing, their shoes. Especially their shoes.”

— Grady Hendrix

61. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I once battled a warlock in Summerville. There is nothing you can say that will shock me.”

— Grady Hendrix

62. “Focus on the real things in your life and I promise you’ll feel better.”

— Grady Hendrix

63. “Women get birth, so men must settle for death. And they’ve become experts on the subject.”

— Grady Hendrix

64. “She had nothing. Except her music.”

— Grady Hendrix

65. “If baseball’s a sin, I’m going to Hell,” Kitty said.”

— Grady Hendrix

66. “An image of Ted Bundy with his arm in a fake cast asking Brenda Ball to help him carry his books to his car flashed across Patricia’s mind. She dismissed it as undignified.”

— Grady Hendrix

67. “NOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO!”

— Grady Hendrix

68. “Horse says we’re safe with his guns, but trust me, I’ve been dove hunting with that man. He can barely hit the sky.”

— Grady Hendrix

69. “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m shifting steel and sweating blood and I don’t think I’m going to make the clean and jerk, or when I’m stuck on the hang and can’t get the snatch, suddenly I’ll feel lighter, like someone has taken my load. And that’s when I look up and I say, ‘That was you, God. Thank you! Thank you for taking my load!”

— Grady Hendrix

70. “To Amanda – It turns out that you did not weigh the same as a feather when thrown from a great height. My saddest day – yet what a victory for science.”

— Grady Hendrix

71. “Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women,” she says. “We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.”

— Grady Hendrix

72. “I don’t relax until I’m on a city bus. On the street, anyone can come at you from any direction. On the bus, there are limited angles of attack. They’re advertising a horror movie overhead and the red signs makes me think of Adrienne, but I need to stay focused. Some boys with instrument cases sit at the back, heads bowed, engrossed in something on one of their phones. Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.”

— Grady Hendrix

73. “Creation and destruction, female and male, life and death, birth and murder.”

— Grady Hendrix

74. “Automatonophobia is the name smug people who’ve never been chased by witch marionettes give to the irrational fear of inanimate objects that resemble human beings: puppets, robots, mannequins, dolls.”

— Grady Hendrix

75. “Sometimes you need the money more than you need to live with yourself.”

— Grady Hendrix

76. “Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.”

— Grady Hendrix

77. “Isn’t the point of therapy that one day you don’t need it anymore?”

— Grady Hendrix

78. “Trust me,” I say. “I’ve seen things that make your porn look like Dora the Explorer.”

— Grady Hendrix

79. “A puppet is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take control... Puppets have no freedom, but they give the puppeteer freedom. They have no life, but they live forever.”

— Grady Hendrix

80. “You don’t want someone angry at you, especially a man, so you say yes to things you don’t want to do because there’s no road map for where you are, nothing to guide you except a neon sign in your head that says Do not make men angry.”

— Grady Hendrix

81. “There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind. The leech has two daughters: Give and Give. Three things are never satisfied; four never say, “Enough.”’ Proverbs 30:15.”

— Grady Hendrix

82. “When you don’t like the way a conversation is going you deflect with personal attacks. You’re like some kind of emotionally abusive octopus entangling everyone in your word tentacles.” “You should talk to your therapist about your choices of imagery,” Mark said. “Pipe organs, octopuses – it’s very revealing.”

— Grady Hendrix

83. “Every story begins in blood: a squalling baby yanked from the womb, bathed in mucus and half a quart of their mother’s blood. But not many stories end in blood these days. Usually it’s a return to the hospital and a dry, quiet death surrounded by machines after a heart attack in the driveway, a stroke on the back porch, or a slow fade from lung cancer.”

— Grady Hendrix

84. “The only people who don’t apologize are psychopaths.”

— Grady Hendrix

85. “She’s a final girl. Keith can’t do anything to her; he has to save himself for you. She has her own monster.” Chrissy shakes her head and smiles. “This isn’t a religion,” she says. “It’s not like Keith’s going to Hell if he goes off his diet.”

— Grady Hendrix

86. “That’s your vanity talking,” she told me. “You just want to be special. Let me tell you something: no one is too far gone to be brought back. No one is too lost to be found. No one.”

— Grady Hendrix

87. “Same with puppets. Put one on and your posture changes, your voice alters, and you can feel what it wants, you can feel what it’s scared of, you know what it needs. You don’t wear the puppet. The puppet wears you.”

— Grady Hendrix

88. “I know this is your religion, but for me it’s just a job.”

— Grady Hendrix

89. “We tend to die, women who’ve been through the fire. Sometimes we choose obvious ways, suicide and overdoses; sometimes we’re more subtle, marrying someone who likes to use his fists, or we drink too much and keep getting behind the wheel until we run out of luck.”

— Grady Hendrix

90. “Her one job as a parent was to protect her children from monsters. The ones under the bed, the ones in the closet, the ones hiding in the dark. Instead, she’d invited the monster into her home and been too weak to stop it from taking whatever it wanted.”

— Grady Hendrix

91. “We’re just the high school quarterback, talking about the touchdown pass he threw in ’72,” she said. “High school was everyone’s glory days. For us, high school is all tangled up in memories of our trauma. We have the same normal nostalgic inclinations as other people, but when we walk back in our minds to this supposedly wonderful time we have people trying to kill us. For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”

— Grady Hendrix

92. “Because you’re real, Pupkin,” Louise said. “And nothing real can last forever. That’s how you know you’re real. Because one day you die.”

— Grady Hendrix

93. “She didn’t want to smell Yankee Candle and carpet cleaner and dust anymore.”

— Grady Hendrix

94. “Be strong, trust in the Lord, and stay hydrated.”

— Grady Hendrix

95. “It didn’t pay to ask questions past one in the morning at Waffle House.”

— Grady Hendrix

96. “Julia’s physiotherapist got promoted to husband and convinced her to hit the talk show circuit. I know what it’s like. You don’t want someone angry at you, especially a man, so you say yes to things you don’t want to do because there’s no road map for where you are, nothing to guide you except a neon sign in your head that says Do not make men angry.”

— Grady Hendrix

97. “The final girl and the monster are two sides of one person. Think about it. One runs fast, and screams, and is resourceful, and fights for her friends. The other is slow, and implacable, and silent, and he kills, and is alone.”

— Grady Hendrix

98. “Of course, what have I ever created except an empty fortress that I locked myself inside, a life with no friends except for a plant that was only alive inside my head? And my book? And those letters?”

— Grady Hendrix

99. “The silence continued and Patricia felt something bigger than her fear: solidarity.”

— Grady Hendrix

100. “How many other plans have I made based on wrong information?”

— Grady Hendrix