Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I know this is your religion, but for me it’s just a job.”

— Grady Hendrix

102. “Being a teenager isn’t a number,” Maryellen said. “It’s the age when you stop liking them.” “You don’t like the girls?” Patricia asked. “No one likes their children,” Maryellen said. “We love them to death, but we don’t like them.”

— Grady Hendrix

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

110. “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

111. “I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.”

— Grady Hendrix

112. “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.”

— Grady Hendrix

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

117. “Once you’ve washed a man’s underwear you realize the sad truth about hidden depths.”

— Grady Hendrix

118. “He left no one behind, no children, no shared memories, no history, no one told stories about him. All he left to mark his passing was pain, and that would fade over time. The people he’d killed would be mourned but the people who loved them would move on. They would fall in love again, have more children, grow old, and be mourned by their children in turn.”

— Grady Hendrix

119. “Patricia’s soul decided that it was no fool and ascended into the afterlife, leaving her at the mercy of the women surrounding her.”

— Grady Hendrix

120. “Louise held Poppy’s feverish, limp body for hours, wishing harder than she’d ever wished before that for just sixty seconds someone would hold her, but no one holds moms.”

— Grady Hendrix

121. “I don’t wear headphones, I don’t wear sunglasses, I make sure my jacket is tight so there’s nothing to snag, and then I say good-bye to my plant, take a deep breath, step out of my apartment, and face a world that wants me dead.”

— Grady Hendrix

122. “This is where we grew up. It’s not The Shining.” “It’s Shining-adjacent,” Mark said in the gloom.”

— Grady Hendrix

123. “Russell lets out a frustrated sigh, probably wishing we were men because then he could communicate with us like adults, and he strides to the window, pausing dramatically by my blackout curtains, striking a pose known as Counselor Addressing the Jury.”

— Grady Hendrix

124. “I miss the books we used to read where at least there was a murder,” Maryellen said. “The problem with book club these days is too many men. They don’t know how to pick a book to save their lives and they love to listen to themselves talk. It’s nothing but opinions, all day long.”

— Grady Hendrix

125. “I’m sending my boys up to live with my sister in Irmo for the summer.” “On vacation?” Patricia asked. “To keep them alive,” Mrs. Greene said. “You heard those Nancy girls chanting out there. There’s something in the wood’s been taking our babies.”

— Grady Hendrix

126. “Heather and I used to be close, but when I realized how unstable she was I started keeping my distance.”

— Grady Hendrix

127. “Abby was beginning to feel like everything was too much. She was beginning to feel like nothing she did made any difference.”

— Grady Hendrix

128. “Ever wonder what happens to those final girls? After the cops eliminate them as suspects, after the press releases their brace-faced, pizza-cheeked, bad-hair-day class photos that inevitably get included on the cover of the true crime book? After the candlelight vigils and the moments of silence, after someone plants the memorial shrub?”

— Grady Hendrix

129. “But she didn’t have a choice. She would have to handle whatever happened. There was no such thing as too much. There was just more and more, and her limits didn’t matter. Life didn’t care. She could only hang on.”

— Grady Hendrix

130. “Brother Lemon slapped his Bible against one of his palms. “Hot damn!” he shouted. “We got ourselves a demon!”

— Grady Hendrix

131. “We’re not a lynch mob, we’re a book club,” Kitty said. “We’ve always been there for each other.”

— Grady Hendrix

132. “She made a mental note.”

— Grady Hendrix

133. “Once you’ve finish reading it, you’ve finished needing it” was her motto.”

— Grady Hendrix

134. “From sunup to sundown, the whole world felt flooded in boiling honey.”

— Grady Hendrix

135. “Every kid has the same question for their parents: who do you love more? Your parents could dodge that question all their lives, they could avoid it for years, but eventually, one way or another, the answer came out.”

— Grady Hendrix

136. “She worried for a moment that she was confused again. Her judgement was thin ice and she hesitated to trust it. But this had been real. It wouldn’t hurt to make sure. After all, she was only a housewife. What else did she have to do?”

— Grady Hendrix

137. “It’s not too clever for a girl to be clever,’ and they laugh at us and think we only care about our hair. The only books they give us are cookbooks because in their minds we are silly, lightweight know-nothings. And you’ve just proven them right.”

— Grady Hendrix

138. “A book club made sense because she liked reading, especially mysteries. Carter had suggested it was because she went through life as if the entire world were a mystery to her, and she didn’t disagree.”

— Grady Hendrix

139. “Fight,” she finally said. Just fight. Never stop.”

— Grady Hendrix

140. “No,” Marilyn says, and she takes my chin and turns my head to face her. “You’re the best of us, Lynnette. You never quit. You never stopped. You saved everyone.”

— Grady Hendrix

141. “Did you know that all the best oracles in classical mythology were crazy?”

— Grady Hendrix

142. “The days dawned noonday hot, and gas tanks hissed when you took off their caps. The sunlight fell hard and sharp, and insects roared in the bushes, only taking a break in the dead hour between three and four in the morning. Windows came down and doors shut tight. Every house became a hermetically sealed space station...”

— Grady Hendrix

143. “Taking the bait has never been a problem for him, but someone had to throw the bait out there in the first place.”

— Grady Hendrix

144. “And nothing real can last forever. That’s how you know you’re real.”

— Grady Hendrix

145. “I love you,” Abby shouted into the storm. “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! I throw my pebble and its name is Gretchen Lang and in the name of our love, BEGONE!!!”

— Grady Hendrix

146. “Our monsters are the night visitors, the child stealers, the boo-baggers, the baby guzzlers. They are the men who eat children. It is the oldest and only story, our attempt to imitate the two divine acts of God: creation and destruction. Birth and death. Women get birth, so men must settle for death. And they’ve become experts on the subject.”

— Grady Hendrix

147. “The problem with book club these days is too many men. They don’t know how to pick a book to save their lives and they love to listen to themselves talk. It’s nothing but opinions, all day long.”

— Grady Hendrix

148. “A haunting doesn’t necessarily indicate the survival of the human soul after bodily death,” he said, chewing. “There’s the stone tape theory of hauntings, which says that powerful emotional experiences leave permanent traces behind. There’s basic thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. So what happens to the energy generated by intense emotional experiences? It has to go somewhere. That’s just science.”

— Grady Hendrix

149. “The point is, you act like you know everything about everyone but you don’t listen to anybody. You just talk at people and tell them what to do.”

— Grady Hendrix

150. “These stuffed animals were how she had first learned to love something that couldn’t always love you back.”

— Grady Hendrix