Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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.”

— Grady Hendrix

252. “The police think all kind of things,” Mrs. Greene said. “Doesn’t necessarily make them true.”

— Grady Hendrix

253. “Just now, she’d conjured $80 out of thin air, turning the sound into money like magic. She had one weapon left. One they couldn’t take away.”

— Grady Hendrix

254. “You can only hope that by the time you come to your senses they haven’t done too much damage. In Julia’s case, by the time she woke up he’d sold her franchise rights, cleaned out her bank accounts, and left her with nothing.”

— Grady Hendrix

255. “Patricia Campbell and the Mystery of Finding Enough Time to Read the Newspaper When You Have Two Children and a Mother-in-Law Living with You and Everyone Needs Their Clothes Washed, and to Be Fed, and the House Needs to Be Cleaned and Someone Has to Give the Dog His Heartworm Pills and You Should Probably Wash Your Own Hair Every Few Days or Your Daughter Is Going to Ask Why You Look Like a Street Person.”

— Grady Hendrix

256. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

261. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

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. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

299. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix