Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

153. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

166. “Sadie told me Pupkin was what Satan had nightmares about, Richard told me he wouldn’t sleep in a room with Pupkin in it, but Clark wanted to try.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

168. “Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another. Death is the harbinger of transformation, that which precedes a new life.”

— Grady Hendrix

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

172. “I’ll come right out and say it,” Mercy told them. “Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed – Your house is haunted and I’m not selling it until you deal with that.”

— Grady Hendrix

173. “Skye and I will be heroes. People will be talking about the statement we made here for years to come. You’re just pointless nostalgia and we’re here to sweep you into the trash. Everyone needs to stop clinging to the past.”

— Grady Hendrix

174. “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

175. “Yeah,” he says, loudly. “But you keep dwelling on it. I mean, Mom says this happened, like, a hundred years ago. You could move on.”

— Grady Hendrix

176. “We’re not a lynch mob, we’re a book club,” Kitty said.”

— Grady Hendrix

177. “Eventually they won’t have their mother to be their short-order cook and laundress and maid. They’ll have to trick some poor woman into marrying them to get all that for free again.”

— Grady Hendrix

178. “And Marilyn and Heather and Dr. Carol probably hate me because they think I’ve committed the one sin we can’t forgive: lying down with your monster. They all think I’m another Chrissy Mercer.”

— Grady Hendrix

179. “You’re right,” I say. “None of us have to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to her. Unfortunately, those things have a bad habit of coming back and trying to kill us again. After a while, you start to realize that your life isn’t the thing that happens between the monsters, your life is the monsters.”

— Grady Hendrix

180. “Work burns the sickness from a man’s mind,” Warden Worth proclaimed. “It is the philosopher’s stone that transmutes the base metal of deviancy into the pure gold of obedience.”

— Grady Hendrix

181. “He looked like a grenade with the pin pulled.”

— Grady Hendrix

182. “Because that’s exactly what he is,” Mercy said, coming out of the kitchen with a wine bottle and a bunch of iced tea glasses. “He’s thirty-seven years old and still works in a bar.”

— Grady Hendrix

183. “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

184. “It didn’t matter what she did. Nothing mattered anymore. The world was broken.”

— Grady Hendrix

185. “Share the joke?” the waitress asked, clonking two coffee cups down on their table. “Been on since five and I could use a laugh.” “None of this is real,” Louise said. The waitress set down a little crockery bowl of nondairy creamer. “I hope not,” she said, pouring coffee.”

— Grady Hendrix

186. “Louise tried to think of how to explain death to a puppet.”

— Grady Hendrix

187. “She was having a nervous breakdown in Waffle House.”

— Grady Hendrix

188. “I always tried to protect you from yourself,′ he said, and put on his sunglasses. She hated him for timing the move so perfectly.”

— Grady Hendrix

189. “She promised herself that she was not going to cry. They could take her job, but they would not take her dignity.”

— Grady Hendrix

190. “Why is it always bitches, Kitty thought. As if men believed that word had some kind of magic power.”

— Grady Hendrix

191. “Nothing was strong enough to stand against the passage of time.”

— Grady Hendrix

192. “Time only moves in one direction no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.”

— Grady Hendrix

193. “Some people use literature to understand their lives,” James Harris said, continuing to stare at Korey, who squirmed beneath the intensity of his gaze. “What are you reading?”

— Grady Hendrix

194. “No one likes their children,” Maryellen said. “We love them to death, but we don’t like them.”

— Grady Hendrix

195. “Does it hurt?” I ask. “Getting shot in the legs?” she asks. “What, because I’m paralyzed? You think it doesn’t hurt? Here’s an idea, Lynnette. Why don’t you go get shot in something you don’t use, like your head, and report back, okay? Jesus Christ. Dr. Carol told me you’d had a breakdown.”

— Grady Hendrix

196. “I’m an atheist,” Mark said. “Pish,” Aunt Gail said, dismissing him. “You’re a Presbyterian, just like your parents.”

— Grady Hendrix

197. “How many times had she stood at a party or in the supermarket, talking about someone’s child being slow, or their baby being ugly, and that person appeared out of nowhere and she smiled in their face and said, I was just thinking about you and that cute baby of yours, and they never had a clue.”

— Grady Hendrix

198. “Orsk is all about scripted disorientation. The store wants you to surrender to a programmed shopping experience. The Cuyahoga Panopticon was the same thing. The warden believed he could cure a criminal brain using forced labor, mindless repetition, and total surveillance. This was back when people believed that architecture could be designed to generate a psychological effect.”

— Grady Hendrix

199. “I know exactly what you need,” Mark said. – “Welcome to Waffle House,” the waitress said, coming over to their back corner booth and stopping short.”

— Grady Hendrix

200. “Of course she can,” Ian said. “I don’t want to sound critical, but you just dropped the entire concept of death on her and left me here to clean up the mess. It didn’t get better when you told her you were coming back early, then changed your mind.”

— Grady Hendrix