Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Patricia reconsidered. Was he rich?”

— Grady Hendrix

202. “Abby Rivers was a certified grown-up because she’d finally cried at a movie.”

— Grady Hendrix

203. “What good is free love if nobody showers?”

— Grady Hendrix

204. “Marasco was a high school English teacher, so his illusions about human nature had long ago been stomped to death.”

— Grady Hendrix

205. “Abby ate shark for the first time. It tasted like steak made out of fish.”

— Grady Hendrix

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Were they really discussing the differences between fried chicken cooked by two women who’d died decades ago? She felt like she wasn’t.”

— Grady Hendrix

211. “I know you don’t like me because I’m not successful enough for you,” Mark said. “But I’m actually happy with my life. People like me. They think I’m a nice guy.”

— Grady Hendrix

212. “She had brown eyes, and I found them and held them with mine, and she instinctively looked away; then she looked back, then she stopped moving and looked at me with a very faint smile on her lips. We looked at each other until it was obvious what was going on, and then we looked a little longer.”

— Grady Hendrix

213. “Johnstone piles incident on incident, trope on trope, and if something isn’t working he keeps on piling. When time itself needs to be brought to a screeching halt, Jay Clute just pulls out his gun and shoots a clock. Because clocks make time, right? In William W. Johnstone’s world, why not?”

— Grady Hendrix

214. “She wanted to close the door and stand on the porch and have an actual adult conversation with this man. She had been so terrified of him, but he was warm, and funny, and he looked at her in a way that made her feel seen.”

— Grady Hendrix

215. “She’d had a left earlobe all her life, and suddenly it was gone. She felt like a friend had died.”

— Grady Hendrix

216. “The paper doesn’t talk about what happens in Six Mile,” Mrs. Greene said. “We’re not quite Mt. Pleasant, not quite Awendaw, not quite anyplace. Certainly not the Old Village. Besides, one little boy has an accident, an old lady runs away with some man, the police figure it’s just colored people being colored. It’d be like reporting on a fish for being wet.”

— Grady Hendrix

217. “Less than twenty percent of Americans supported that war. No one wanted to send their sons and daughters to die in the desert, but the generals gathered in their masses, right? And look at the world they made.”

— Grady Hendrix

218. “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.”

— Grady Hendrix

219. “Since time immemorial, humankind’s greatest natural predator has been the clown.”

— Grady Hendrix

220. “She could taste the swampy stink coating the roof of her mouth, turning her saliva bitter and sending it trickling down the back of her throat.”

— Grady Hendrix

221. “The car buzzed at her, as if a door ajar was the most important problem in her life right now.”

— Grady Hendrix

222. “This year, the not-quite-a-book-club was reading the classics: Helter Skelter, In Cold Blood, Zodiac, Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, and a new edition of Fatal Vision with yet another epilogue updating the reader on the feud between the author and his subject.”

— Grady Hendrix

223. “We’ve been cleaning up after men our entire lives. This is no different.”

— Grady Hendrix

224. “There’s so much life and it just keeps going. Maybe not everyone’s life, but Life. It doesn’t stop for anyone... no matter how hard we try, we can’t stop life. No matter how much we fight, no matter how many we kill, things keep changing, and growing, and living, and people get lost, and fall away, and come back, and get born, and move on, and no matter what it’s all so much, it’s all so hard, the way life just keeps going and going.”

— Grady Hendrix

225. “Oh, can it,” Abby’s mom said. “Martin never liked you, either.” Abby’s dad stopped rubbing his pants for a moment and shrugged his bony shoulders. “Now that’s not entirely true,” he said. “I just never thought about you long enough to develop an opinion.”

— Grady Hendrix

226. “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

227. “It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

— Grady Hendrix

228. “There was no falling-out, no great tragedy, just a hundred thousand trivial moments they didn’t share, each one an inch of distance between them, and eventually those inches added up to miles.”

— Grady Hendrix

229. “What good is free love if nobody showers?” Maryellen asked.”

— Grady Hendrix

230. “Friend “ is a word whose sharp corners have been worn smooth by overuse. “I’m friends with the guys in IT,” she might say, or “I’m being some friends after work.” But she remembers when the word “friend” could draw blood.”

— Grady Hendrix

231. “You had a bag of money because that was how you had been paid, and people who got paid in cash were either hit men, drug dealers, bank robbers – or waiters, she supposed. But James Harris didn’t seem like a waiter.”

— Grady Hendrix

232. “In Charleston, the day you become an adult is the day you learn to ignore your neighbor’s drunk driving and focus instead on whether he submitted a paint-color change proposal to the Board of Architectural Review. The day you become an adult is the day you learn that in Charleston, the worse something is, the less attention it receives.”

— Grady Hendrix

233. “He was just a little boy in love with himself, making deals without ever asking the price, thinking he’d never have to pay. She saw him, not evil, not good, just another boy who thought he was the only person in the world who mattered.”

— Grady Hendrix

234. “Before she could react, Louise found herself and Poppy enveloped in a hug that felt like an airbag going off in her face.”

— Grady Hendrix

235. “Mothering, manipulating – sometimes there wasn’t a difference. She’d learned that from her mom.”

— Grady Hendrix

236. “You’ve been three thousand miles away,” Mark said. “While I’ve been here dealing with Mom and Dad being dead, so you don’t get to suddenly parachute out of your nerd plane and start barking orders.”

— Grady Hendrix

237. “Louise knew her dad. His cheapness was legendary. He called it “understanding the value of a dollar.”

— Grady Hendrix

238. “It was cruel to make her think that someone had come for her. It was sadistic to make her think she was not alone when she knew that she was always alone.”

— Grady Hendrix

239. “You ladies read a strange assortment of books,” James Harris said. “We’re a strange assortment of broads,” Kitty replied.”

— Grady Hendrix

240. “Trinity was one of those happy, super-popular, high-energy girls who reminded Amy of the creatures from Gremlins: she was fun for about half an hour, then you wanted to stuff her in a blender.”

— Grady Hendrix

241. “Chrissy said there were only two forces in the world and they balance each other: life and death. Creation and destruction.”

— Grady Hendrix

242. “You can’t judge a book by its cover but the cover does give you a pretty good indication of what’s inside.”

— Grady Hendrix

243. “I’m not sure if puppets and dolls are the same, theologically speaking, but eBay is rife with them.”

— Grady Hendrix

244. “They filled up their time between childhood and old age trying to be as unremarkable as possible.”

— Grady Hendrix

245. “We get subjected to sequels. That’s what makes our guys different, that’s what makes them monsters – they keep coming back.”

— Grady Hendrix

246. “She turned to the back section about the trials, and read about Charles Manson getting sentenced to death over and over again as if it were a bedtime story. She needed to reassure herself that not all men got away with it, not every time. She read about Charles Manson’s sentencing until her eyes got grainy and she fell asleep.”

— Grady Hendrix

247. “At the end of the day, some rich white people lost their money. Some poor black people lost their homes. That’s just how it goes.”

— Grady Hendrix

248. “I’m not sure how we could have been expected to know that a significant portion of them had parents deployed overseas. I also feel like maybe the first little girl who started crying might have been looking for attention?”

— Grady Hendrix

249. “You have so much, but he has so little.”

— Grady Hendrix

250. “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