Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Once you’ve washed a man’s underwear you realize the sad truth about hidden depths.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

103. “She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other’s names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive.”

— Grady Hendrix

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Like most elementary schoolteachers, Miss Mary had drunk from the fountain of eternal late middle age;.”

— Grady Hendrix

107. “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

108. “That’s enough for you? Continued respiration? That’s all you have to offer to the world? There’s more to life than staying alive.”

— Grady Hendrix

109. “Sometimes you don’t know why you’re doing anything anymore so you just keep moving even though you’re out of options.”

— Grady Hendrix

110. “Abby’s guts were so full of stomach acid, her burps could etch steel.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

112. “She made a mental note.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “She had failed as a mother and now she had failed as a daughter. Her parents were ashes in a hole in the ground. Her brother had taken the house from her. And she was about to throw everything her mom ever made in the trash. She felt so drained.”

— Grady Hendrix

130. “We don’t know what happened in there.” “I do,” Amy said. “There was a prison here, and we built a new prison on its ruins, and all the old prisoners came out to give it a try.” Basil kept staring up at the store and then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds about right.”

— Grady Hendrix

131. “I’m not surprised that your home is infested with demonic forces,” she said. “Your mother’s puppet ministry trivialized the church. When you move off the path of righteousness you risk being co-opted by the Enemy.”

— Grady Hendrix

132. “Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

134. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

136. “She thought about these women – Aunt Honey, her grandmother, her mom – deciding what needed to be done and doing it. They had a hardness she was beginning to think, more and more, she’d inherited. A hardness she couldn’t have imagined before she had her own child.”

— Grady Hendrix

137. “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

138. “Every book was “better than Rosemary’s Baby,” “more terrifying than The Exorcist,” and “in the tradition of The Other!” Read in the right order, the titles painted a grim portrait of Satan marching from free-spirited young demon to middle-aged ennui: Satan’s Holiday, Satan’s Gal, Satan’s Seed, Satan’s Child, Satan’s Bride, Satan Sublets, The Sorrows of Satan, Satan’s Mistress, Satan: His Psychotherapy and His Cure.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

143. “Things change, flesh rots, houses decay and fall into disrepair – there’s no point complaining. But the lost creativity makes you want to scream and pound on the inside of your coffin lid as it’s being nailed into place.”

— Grady Hendrix

144. “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

145. “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

146. “I bet the only time people ever talk to him is when they ask if he’s saving that seat next to him at the movies.”

— Grady Hendrix

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

150. “Good girl. Smart girl. Final girl.”

— Grady Hendrix