Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “People are going to live longer in the future,” she said. “We might still be alive.” “But we won’t know how to set the clocks on our VCRs and we’ll be old and hate young people and vote Republican like my parents,” Gretchen said.”

— Grady Hendrix

252. “Are you kidding?” He smiles. “This whole thing smelled like ratshit from the word go.”

— Grady Hendrix

253. “Let’s stand here and argue about the caliber of weapon the girl you thought was your new best friend is using to murder everyone,” Julia says.”

— Grady Hendrix

254. “It is that bad, sir,’ he said. ‘I served with Chinese Gordon and lost everything in Khartoum. My mates. My fortune. My arms and legs.’ “‘They’ll grow back,’ I said. “‘They will?’ he asked, through his tears. “’Of course they will. I’m a doctor. You just have to give them time and... and drink more whiskey.”

— Grady Hendrix

255. “Louise felt petty, but the way her brother looked embarrassed her.”

— Grady Hendrix

256. “Everything her mom had built, everything she had spent her life creating, everything that meant so much to her, it was gone. The rain and mud and the feet of strangers had destroyed it all.”

— Grady Hendrix

257. “She’d quit on enough things in her life – she wasn’t going to quit on this.”

— Grady Hendrix

258. “The point is, you act like you know everything about everyone but you don’t listen to anybody. You just talk at people and tell them what to do.”

— Grady Hendrix

259. “There’s so much life and it just keeps going. Maybe not everyone’s life, but Life. It doesn’t stop for anyone.”

— Grady Hendrix

260. “For toil is the great grinding stone to make keen the blade of your spirit. Toil is the ladder by which your putrid flesh ascends into health.”

— Grady Hendrix

261. “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

262. “The monsters in our lives are as particular about their final girls as people are about their Starbucks order. Black nonfat camp counselor with high threshold for pain and an extra shot. A double soy lesbian babysitter who’s not afraid to stab someone in the eye, hold the foam.”

— Grady Hendrix

263. “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

264. “These are our parents!” Louise shouted, the first time she’d shouted at an adult maybe ever. “They’re not a doughnut! You don’t split them in half.”

— Grady Hendrix

265. “These stuffed animals were how she had first learned to love something that couldn’t always love you back.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

267. “Dr. Carol looks at me with a complete lack of understanding. It’s getting hard for me to stay calm, but I know I have to. I take two breaths before she speaks.”

— Grady Hendrix

268. “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

269. “If it had fangs, sharp teeth, or bloody lips on the cover, Patricia bought it. Her final total: $149.96.”

— Grady Hendrix

270. “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

271. “It wasn’t the same song, it never is, each time you play it the song changes, but the feeling remains the same.”

— Grady Hendrix

272. “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

273. “It felt like someone had picked it up and shaken out all the people and all the history and left it empty, not a house anymore but a series of boxes, connected by wall-to-wall carpeting, with nothing left inside. Their house didn’t feel haunted anymore.”

— Grady Hendrix

274. “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

275. “She had failed as a mother and now she had failed as a daughter. Her parents were ashes in a hole in the ground. Her brother had taken the house from her. And she was about to throw everything her mom ever made in the trash. She felt so drained.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

277. “A puppet is a possession that possesses the possessor. And a mask turns a person into a puppet.”

— Grady Hendrix

278. “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

279. “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

280. “First came Jaws by Peter Benchley, a novel about a stressed-out great white shark suffering from portion control issues. It sank its teeth into the New York Times Best-Seller List and hung on for an astonishing forty-five weeks.”

— Grady Hendrix

281. “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

282. “Why are we more comfortable with fast, dramatic deaths than the slow decay most people get? After all, isn’t this why we fought so hard? To have the right to do what Michelle is doing right this minute?”

— Grady Hendrix

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “How does a sparrow destroy a mountain? One pebble at a time.”

— Grady Hendrix

288. “The kind of people who dressed up as Ricky Walker and marched around outside my house, who followed my foster mom to malls and tried to steal her used Kleenex for voodoo rituals. These are not logical thinkers.”

— Grady Hendrix

289. “She melts into the line of police and I know she’s cut a deal, she traded me to save herself. It’s what I did to Julia: abandoned her to save myself. It’s unforgivable.”

— Grady Hendrix

290. “It hurts me to talk about Billy like he’s a normal artist, exhibiting in galleries and negotiating with buyers.”

— Grady Hendrix

291. “The most expressive parts of her body are her nipples. They noticeably harden when she is aroused, surprised, confused or meeting new people. They are practically prehensile tentacles, capable of lengthening, thickening, unfurling, budding, flaring and swelling.”

— Grady Hendrix

292. “After Abby’s divorce, no matter how hard she tried to hold everything together, it all kept falling apart. Mary wouldn’t sleep and kept pulling out her hair and Abby couldn’t get her to stop, and in the middle of everything Gretchen showed up at her front door a couple weeks before Christmas and moved in. That didn’t fix everything, but now there were two of them, and Abby thought it was better to be miserable together than to be miserable alone.”

— Grady Hendrix

293. “In college, she didn’t take mushrooms or microdose acid and only kind of enjoyed the occasional glass of wine, and when she saw a person having a mental health crisis in the street, she gave them a lot of distance and the next time she needed to go down that street she tried to find another way.”

— Grady Hendrix

294. “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

295. “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

296. “This is also a book about vampires. They’re that iconic American archetype of the rambling man, wearing denim, wandering from town to town with no past and no ties. Think Jack Kerouac, think Shane, think Woody Guthrie. Think Ted Bundy.”

— Grady Hendrix

297. “Up here everything felt epic, felt mythic, felt like magic, and lyrics that had been written in the basement of the Witch House came out of Terry’s throat like an incantation.”

— Grady Hendrix

298. “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

299. “Where everyone was desperate to be an individual, but they all were terrified to stand out.”

— Grady Hendrix

300. “I see,” Dani says, “is a bunch of women I barely know who are obsessed with what happened to them in high school.”

— Grady Hendrix