Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The spirit of Christmas, it seemed, had touched us all, each in different ways. Some of us were rich, some of us were dead, some of us were on a steamship to Brazil, and some of us had avoided prosecution for manslaughter.”

— Grady Hendrix

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

155. “His words resonated with something deep inside Amy’s mind. She did run around, trying desperately to get somewhere, and what was the point? Was there a point?”

— Grady Hendrix

156. “She made a mental note.”

— Grady Hendrix

157. “I realize it has everything to do with Pupkin. I saw him move. He tried to kill you. Those dolls in the bathroom wrote that note on the wall, but the one who’s behind everything is that creepy little puppet.” It suddenly sounded.”

— Grady Hendrix

158. “Everyone keeps telling me it’s all over, that it’s back to normal, but I don’t want to go back to normal. I don’t like the person I used to be. I want to keep being the person I was that night.”

— Grady Hendrix

159. “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

160. “I won’t let this keep chewing up more and more people. I won’t let messed-up parents keep making monsters, and I wont let these boys keep making more final girls. It’s not some profound and ancient ritual. It’s just a waste of a life.”

— Grady Hendrix

161. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

163. “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

164. “You’ve become such a grouch,” she said. “Having your arm sawed off will do that.”

— Grady Hendrix

165. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

167. “Everyone realizes that at some point, right? It’s part of growing up. You realize you’re not going to be the star of the show. You realize you’re going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent.”

— Grady Hendrix

168. “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

169. “Vacuum your curtains,” Grace said. “No one ever does it enough. I promise it’ll make you feel better.”

— Grady Hendrix

170. “The last time we did this we learned one thing,” Patricia said. “The men stick together. Their friendship with him is stronger now than it was then. There’s only us.”

— Grady Hendrix

171. “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

172. “You said you wanted to live where people watched out for each other,” Patricia told her. “But what’s the good of watching if we’re not going to act?”

— Grady Hendrix

173. “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

174. “She was that horse in Animal Farm that worked and worked until they sent him to the glue factory. She did not quit.”

— Grady Hendrix

175. “Someone comes along saying they’ll save you and you throw yourself into their arms and let them make all the decisions. You can only hope that by the time you come to your senses they haven’t done too much damage.”

— Grady Hendrix

176. “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

177. “I don’t have a therapist,” Louise said. “That explains a lot.” “You’re doing it again! I don’t need relationship advice from a grown man who works in a bar and believes in ghosts.”

— Grady Hendrix

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

181. “You wrote that book,” she says, standing over me. “That goddamn book. What the hell was going through your head to write trash like that? You think I’m in a codependent relationship with my Michelle? My everything? I use her to isolate myself from group? You think that?”

— Grady Hendrix

182. “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

183. “All my words keep coming back to hurt me. The letters. This book. Everything I ever wrote is a weapon turned against me. Everything I’ve ever thought comes back to make me bleed.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

185. “Stay here with me in reality. Things are so much better now than they were. Everyone’s happy. We’re all okay.”

— Grady Hendrix

186. “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

187. “So many new people are moving here. It used to be you’d only see bumper stickers for the Gamecocks, or Clemson, or the Citadel. Now you’ve got people driving around with Alabama and UVA stickers. Any one of them could be a serial killer for all we know.”

— Grady Hendrix

188. “Everyone knew that any place up north was roughly the same: lawless, relatively savage, and while they might have nice museums and the Statue of Liberty, people cared so little for each other they’d let you die in the street.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

190. “Hitler said caffeine was poison,” Blue said.”

— Grady Hendrix

191. “There are only six of us still around. It used to make me sad there weren’t more of us out there, but we were creatures of the eighties and the world has moved on.”

— Grady Hendrix

192. “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

193. “Abby realized that no one was going to do anything. For five years, Gretchen had been the perfect Albemarle student, and the faculty still saw what they were used to seeing – not what was really happening.”

— Grady Hendrix

194. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

196. “Does it make you feel superior to give them a diagnosis, to file them away in a little drawer? You know they’re bigger than that. If it were just a psychological problem we could find a cure.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

198. “Marjorie Fretwell once sucked a copperhead up in her vacuum cleaner because she didn’t know what to do with it and then she had to throw the whole vacuum away,” Kitty said. “Don’t talk to me about Marjorie Fretwell.”

— Grady Hendrix

199. “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

200. “She cried because at last it hit her that time only moves in one direction, no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.”

— Grady Hendrix