Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The only people who don’t apologize are psychopaths.”

— Grady Hendrix

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “One thing she’d learned about men: they liked to talk.”

— Grady Hendrix

113. “Nu metal kids are cul-de-sac crybabies with their baseball hats on backward. Every song is a little boy crying in his bedroom about how his girlfriend won’t make him a sandwich like his mommy used to do.”

— Grady Hendrix

114. “For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”

— Grady Hendrix

115. “The judge encouraged the girl’s parents not to press charges because Riley came from a fine family and had his whole future ahead of him.”

— Grady Hendrix

116. “Have you noticed a vibe in this house?” Mercy asked. “Everything feels a little off, doesn’t it?”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

119. “It’s a child a year, for three years,” Patricia said. “I know they’re not our children, but they’re children. Are we not supposed to care about them because they’re poor and black? That’s how we acted before and now he wants Blue. When will he stop? Maybe he’ll want Tiger next, or Merit, or one of Maryellen’s?”

— Grady Hendrix

120. “Carter stood by the door, not moving, arms folded, surveying the scene he had created, not going to comfort their son, not unstrapping her arms so she could do it instead, and Patricia thought, I will never forgive you for this. Never. Never. Never.”

— Grady Hendrix

121. “We love them to death, but we don’t like them.”

— Grady Hendrix

122. “Why can’t that one do it?” Miss Mary asked, jabbing a gnarled finger at Patricia. “Because you’re working that one’s last nerve,” Mrs. Greene said. “And if that one doesn’t get a break she’s liable to throw you off the roof.” Miss Mary thought about it for a minute, then said, “No one’s pushing me off any roof.” “Keep acting like that and I might help her,” Mrs. Greene said.”

— Grady Hendrix

123. “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

124. “A psycho and his brother tried to kill me,” I say. “Same thing happened to all of us, essentially. What’s to disagree on?”

— Grady Hendrix

125. “So,” Glee said. “If you want to communicate with Satan, you’d be better off brushing your teeth than doing ouija.”

— Grady Hendrix

126. “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

127. “Good girl. Smart girl. Final girl.”

— Grady Hendrix

128. “Great,” Maryellen moaned. “Another man with his opinions.”

— Grady Hendrix

129. “Then again, I moved here because you people are all so stupid,” he said. “You’ll take anyone at face value as long as he’s white and has money.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

131. “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

132. “You wish that a gang of unwashed hippies would break into your house and murder your family and write death to pigs in human blood on your walls because you don’t want to pack bag lunches anymore?”

— Grady Hendrix

133. “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

134. “Books can inspire you to love yourself more, it said. By listening to, writing out, or verbally expressing your feelings.”

— Grady Hendrix

135. “In every book we read, no one ever thought anything bad was happening until it was too late. This is where we live, it’s where our children live, it’s our home. Don’t you want to do absolutely everything you can to keep it safe?”

— Grady Hendrix

136. “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

137. “He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something... there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”

— Grady Hendrix

138. “Her parents are the ones who sold the prom dress,” I say. “Sometimes you need the money more than you need to live with yourself.”

— Grady Hendrix

139. “Out there in the world it’s a nonstop murder party, and if I make the slightest mistake I’ll wind up dead.”

— Grady Hendrix

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

143. “Patricia, would you cheat on Carter with a stranger who showed up on your doorstep, with no people, and told you he was a vegetarian? You’d want to at least check his driver’s license first, wouldn’t you?”

— Grady Hendrix

144. “You’re going to hurt the feelings of all those new library books,” Louise said, and instantly Poppy’s eyes got wide. “They’re going to be sad you didn’t want to read them first. You’re going to make them cry.”

— Grady Hendrix

145. “When I was a kid I didn’t take my mom seriously. She was a housewife who was in a book club, and she and her friends were always running errands, and driving car pool, and forcing us to follow rules that didn’t make sense. They just seemed like a bunch of lightweights. Today I realize how many things they were dealing with that I was totally unaware of. They took the hits so we could skate by obliviously, because that’s the deal; as a parent, you endure pain so your children don’t have to.”

— Grady Hendrix

146. “And by the time this story is over, they will be covered in blood. Some of it will be theirs. Some of it will belong to others. But they will drip with it. They will swim in it. They will drown in it.”

— Grady Hendrix

147. “It touched off a fire inside her, but Patricia had the clarity to see how carefully Carter had built this trap for her. Anything she did would prove him right. She could hear him saying in his smooth psychiatric tones, It’s a sign of how sick you are, that you can’t see how sick you are.”

— Grady Hendrix

148. “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

149. “Patricia suspected that getting entangled with women like this was the first step on a slippery slope that ended with her wearing felt reindeer antlers at Christmas...”

— Grady Hendrix

150. “She wanted to call Grace, to tell her what she’d seen, but when Grace didn’t understand something she refused to believe it existed.”

— Grady Hendrix