Top 400 Grady Hendrix Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “In the end, Amy thought, everything always comes down to those two choices: stay down or stand up.”

— Grady Hendrix

352. “But even in the twenty-first century it was hard to predict how a pair of Southern parents would react to the news that their thirty-four-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant.”

— Grady Hendrix

353. “You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times.”

— Grady Hendrix

354. “Patricia realized she needed to get out of the house and meet new people the moment she leaned over at supper with Carter’s boss and tried to cut up his steak for him. A.”

— Grady Hendrix

355. “In a way, the chair was her friend. It freed her from all the illusions. It showed her the truth. She was alone. No one was there to help her.”

— Grady Hendrix

356. “No split. No fifty-fifty. Everything went to Mark, and nothing went to Louise because Mark deserves it and Louise, well, she can take care of herself. They could not see him the way he really was, the way Louise had seen him all her life.”

— Grady Hendrix

357. “Orsk was designed to move customers counterclockwise, keeping them in a state of retail hypnosis.”

— Grady Hendrix

358. “She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?”

— Grady Hendrix

359. “Adrienne’s face is all over the news. It’s been a long time since anyone cared about a living final girl, but I guess a dead one really brings the circus into town.”

— Grady Hendrix

360. “You’re on your side,” Mrs. Greene said. “Don’t ever fool yourself about that.”

— Grady Hendrix

361. “Corn dogs are all the proof I need that there is a God.”

— Grady Hendrix

362. “But my business is houses, and half of selling a house is psychological. Can’t you guys feel how off this place is?”

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

364. “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

365. “This isn’t girl power,” I say, panic-talking now. “You’re Skye’s puppet. In court your lawyer’s going to claim emotional coercion. You weren’t responsible for your actions. The man was in charge all the way. You’ll be just another victim of a powerful, manipulative male.”

— Grady Hendrix

366. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

368. “Don’t be absurd,′ Grace said. ‘Mrs. Greene and I will stay behind. We’ve been cleaning up after men our entire lives. This is no different.”

— Grady Hendrix

369. “She marveled at how easy they were with each other, how they got along so unselfconsciously, how different they were from her and Mark.”

— Grady Hendrix

370. “That was all over now. The cards on every occasion, the phone calls on every birthday, the Christmas newsletter going out to however many hundreds of people. None of it would ever happen again.”

— Grady Hendrix

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

376. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Grady Hendrix

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

— Grady Hendrix

392. “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

393. “Now there’s always a chance that if you find acid hidden underneath a mattress in a Holiday Inn, left there by two guys you’ve never met, who were hiding it from the police and who are now in jail, it might be spiked with strychnine or something worse. But there was also a chance that it might not be spiked with strychnine or something worse, and Abby preferred to look on the bright side.”

— Grady Hendrix

394. “And some man who’s never felt his baby crown is stronger than me? -Slick.”

— Grady Hendrix

395. “That was the good thing about Gretchen. As much as she wanted to save the planet, she was pretty casual about it.”

— Grady Hendrix

396. “How’ve you ignored it for so long?” Louise asked. “It’s what we do,” Mark said. “Our whole family functions on secrets.”

— Grady Hendrix

397. “I did it to mess with you,” Louise said. “Because you always get everything and Mom never told you ‘no,’ but I can’t anymore. Being here is really bad for my mental health. So you win. It’s all yours. I’m done.”

— Grady Hendrix

398. “Y’all want to talk to Satan?”

— Grady Hendrix

399. “Maybe I’m good at it because for me, all romance is a fantasy. I don’t have any real-life experience to get in the way.”

— Grady Hendrix

400. “If you’re going to murder your best friend with an axe, you should make sure you know what you’re doing.”

— Grady Hendrix