Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

203. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

205. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

207. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “She became their loudest advocate and their most vocal defender. She pursued every conspiracy theory and used the settlement from her homecoming night massacre to fund legal challenges to their convictions.”

— Grady Hendrix

216. “No. She would not say it. If she said it, then she was agreeing this was fine, that it was okay for a weird person she did not know to give her a Bible.”

— Grady Hendrix

217. “Then let’s rock and roll!” she said. “But first, I’ve got a bladder full of passion fruit lemonade that needs a download, and I warn y’all, the walls in here are real thin. You might want to go outside.”

— Grady Hendrix

218. “She didn’t worry, she didn’t smile, she didn’t feel out of place. A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.”

— Grady Hendrix

219. “Sorry about this,” he said, his massive jaws grinding the meat. “Andras is the sixty-third entity in the Lesser Key of Solomon, a grand marquis of hell and commander of thirty legions of demons, known as the sower of discord and bringer of ruin. I need to protein-load.”

— Grady Hendrix

220. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “What danger signs should patients watch for when selecting a skeleton doctor? Well, if the doctor refers to patients as “poor unlucky bastards,” be careful. Also, doctors who turn abandoned mental institutions into their own private research facilities are probably up to no good. Especially when the entrance to said clinic is “an underground passageway behind the morgue.” Most important, just remember that whenever a skeleton does science, innocent people wind up getting hurt.”

— Grady Hendrix

228. “She checked underneath the sink but didn’t see anything that might destroy an evil puppet.”

— Grady Hendrix

229. “Patricia reconsidered. Was he rich?”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

234. “Kris,” he said. “Let us go into a battle from which we may never return. But I have sworn Odin’s Oath to keep you safe, and I believe in our victory. For our hearts are pure, Troglodyte is with us, and I just gave the van its annual emissions inspection.” With that, he dropped the minivan into drive. “Until Valhalla!” he shouted. And they took off on their final ride.”

— Grady Hendrix

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

248. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

250. “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