Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “When I was a kid I didn’t take my mom seriously. She was a housewife who was in a book club, and she and her friends were always running errands, and driving car pool, and forcing us to follow rules that didn’t make sense. They just seemed like a bunch of lightweights. Today I realize how many things they were dealing with that I was totally unaware of. 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

204. “And by the time this story is over, they will be covered in blood. Some of it will be theirs. Some of it will belong to others. But they will drip with it. They will swim in it. They will drown in it.”

— Grady Hendrix

205. “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

206. “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

207. “She wanted to call Grace, to tell her what she’d seen, but when Grace didn’t understand something she refused to believe it existed.”

— Grady Hendrix

208. “Another person knows what you taste like now,” Blue said.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

213. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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. “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

227. “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

228. “Louise swore to herself that she would not cry. Her mother had arranged this entire performance to humiliate her, and she would not cry.”

— Grady Hendrix

229. “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

230. “She knew their names, she had seen her mom make every single one of them, she’d used some of them to perform her mom’s shows, and they had been happy for so long, and warm, and safe, and cared for, and now they had lost their creator and grief had twisted them into the deranged thing and she didn’t want to do this.”

— Grady Hendrix

231. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

236. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

238. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

240. “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

241. “You keep rescuing me and I don’t know why,” Gretchen said. “But every day I tell myself my life must be worth something because you keep saving it. They can’t keep us apart. I don’t care what happens. You never stopped trying to save me.”

— Grady Hendrix

242. “She felt unsettled. She felt unfocused. She wished she could go home to Poppy. She felt so tired.”

— 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. “Reality is not a consensus!” Louise said. “We don’t all get a vote!”

— Grady Hendrix

245. “Fight,” she finally said. Just fight. Never stop.”

— Grady Hendrix

246. “Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters.”

— Grady Hendrix

247. “What had been destroyed made what remained that much more precious. That much more solid. That much more important.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

249. “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

250. “How dare Marilyn slight her honor? How can she possibly suggest that the solemn word of a junkie who has smoked, snorted, and shot up every chemical on the planet is not legally binding? How dare Marilyn imply that Heather’s word is not the verbal equivalent of an ironclad contract.”

— Grady Hendrix