Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I promise you things are not as bad as they seem. Nothing you’re feeling is permanent. But you have to get inside, get cleaned up and get normal...”

— Grady Hendrix

352. “This is where we grew up. It’s not The Shining.” “It’s Shining-adjacent,” Mark said in the gloom.”

— Grady Hendrix

353. “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

354. “Louise started to giggle. She couldn’t help it. This nice, clean restaurant, everyone acting normal, Mark acting normal, but a puppet had tried to kill her and she wasn’t normal anymore. She laughed harder.”

— Grady Hendrix

355. “I know you think I’m a joke,” he said. “No one ever took me seriously – not in the band, not at Vector Print, not at Quiznos. But I’ve been preparing for this for ten years. You need me to get you to Terry. I’m the only one who can do it. I really can do magic, Kris.”

— Grady Hendrix

356. “Abby realized she was asleep. And she was smiling.”

— Grady Hendrix

357. “The world was a trap and there was no way out. Melanie started to cry.”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

359. “We want the people we know to be who we think they are, and to stay how we know them.”

— Grady Hendrix

360. “Stealing the mail is a federal crime.”

— Grady Hendrix

361. “Russell lets out a frustrated sigh, probably wishing we were men because then he could communicate with us like adults, and he strides to the window, pausing dramatically by my blackout curtains, striking a pose known as Counselor Addressing the Jury.”

— Grady Hendrix

362. “Mom,” she said. “What if I miss?” “Then you tried your best,” Patricia told her. “What if I break one of her windows?” Korey asked. “Then I’ll buy you a frozen yogurt on the way home,” Patricia said.”

— Grady Hendrix

363. “Are you going to do it?” she asked. “Hell, yeah,” Abby said. “Are you scared?” she asked. “Hell, yeah,” Abby said. “So why?” “Because I want to know if Dark Side of the Moon is actually profound.”

— Grady Hendrix

364. “Because after all the monsters have flown away, hope is what’s left at the bottom of the box.”

— Grady Hendrix

365. “Sadie told me Pupkin was what Satan had nightmares about, Richard told me he wouldn’t sleep in a room with Pupkin in it, but Clark wanted to try.”

— Grady Hendrix

366. “She had wanted some time after the funeral to adjust to her parents being gone before dealing with all this money stuff, but she was a mom. Nothing happened on her schedule.”

— Grady Hendrix

367. “You’ve lied all your life and now your lies are hurting my little girl.” Aunt Honey.”

— Grady Hendrix

368. “It’s Shining-adjacent,” Mark said in the gloom. “If you could admit that maybe you don’t know everything, you wouldn’t be raising Poppy alone.”

— Grady Hendrix

369. “For years, Amy had wondered what would happen if she stopped fighting and let go. For as long as she remembered, she had been scared of how far she would fall if she stopped struggling.”

— Grady Hendrix

370. “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. You realize you’re going to be lucky to scrape by and pay the rent.”

— Grady Hendrix

371. “That’s how you know you are real – one day you die.”

— Grady Hendrix

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “But she didn’t have a choice. She would have to handle whatever happened. There was no such thing as too much. There was just more and more, and her limits didn’t matter. Life didn’t care. She could only hang on.”

— Grady Hendrix

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

381. “Sometimes you don’t know why you’re doing anything anymore so you just keep moving even though you’re out of options.”

— Grady Hendrix

382. “I’ll come right out and say it,” Mercy told them. “Strange noises, bad vibes, your mom and dad recently passed – Your house.”

— Grady Hendrix

383. “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

384. “Abby’s guts were so full of stomach acid, her burps could etch steel.”

— Grady Hendrix

385. “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

386. “There were so many dolls in there, waiting for her. Somewhere, in a less rational part of her brain, Louise felt that nothing could look so human and exist for so long without starting to develop thoughts on its own. What did the dolls think about?”

— Grady Hendrix

387. “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

388. “But if there was one thing she was learning it was that she could endure anything, even the unendurable.”

— Grady Hendrix

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

399. “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

400. “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