Grady Hendrix Quotes

• “He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”

  Grady Hendrix

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• “Sometimes she craved a little danger. And that was why she had book club.”

  Grady Hendrix

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• “Let's make sure it's really raining before we worry about floods.”

  Grady Hendrix

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• “I love you, Gretchen Lang. You are my reflection and my shadow and I will not let you go. We are bound together forever and ever! Until Halley’s Comet comes around again. I love you dearly and I love you queerly and no demon is bigger than this!”

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• “Why do you pretend what we do is nothing?” she asked. “Every day, all the chaos and messiness of life happens and every day we clean it all up. Without us, they would just wallow in filth and disorder and nothing of any consequence would ever get done. Who taught you to sneer at that? I’ll tell you who. Someone who took their mother for granted.”

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• “We’re a book club,” Maryellen said. “What are we supposed to do? Read him to death? Use strong language?”

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• “A girl with a guitar never has to apologize for anything.”

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• “The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane.”

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• “By the power of Phil Collins, I rebuke you!” she said. “By the power of Phil Collins, who knows that you coming back to me is against all odds, in his name I command you to leave this servant of Genesis alone.”

  Grady Hendrix

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• “it is possible to be crazy and paranoid and totally insane and still be right. Maybe the problem with everyone is that the world has become so insane they’re not out of their minds enough to comprehend it.”

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• “A reader lives many lives,” James Harris said. “The person who doesn’t read lives but one.”

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• “I've had three children . . . And some man who's never felt . . . his baby crown is stronger than me? Is tougher than me?”

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• “When those things happened, they learned that although those inches may add up to miles, sometimes those miles were only inches after all.”

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• “You’d rather get stabbed forty-one times than ruin the curb appeal of your home?” Maryellen asked.
  “Yes,” Grace said.”

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• “Being a teenager isn't a number, " Maryellen said. "It's the age when you stop liking them.”

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• “There are enough people running around in here. It’s starting to feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

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• “Think of us what you will," she thought, "we made mistakes, and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot car pool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.”

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• “With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom.
  As you'll see, it's not a fair fight.”

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• “Everyone's hungry for our children," she said, and her voice cracked. "The whole world wants to gobble up colored children and no matter how many it takes it just licks its lips and wants more.”

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• “A song isn't a commercial for an album. It isn't a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

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• “She could decide how she was going to be. She had a choice. Life could be an endless series of joyless chores, or she could get totally pumped and make it fun. There were bad things, and there were good things, but she got to choose which things to focus on. Her mom focused only on the bad things. Abby didn’t have to.”

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• “Life doesn’t care what you want, other people don’t care what you want. All that matters is what you do.”

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• “Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn't play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn't play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn't handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn't fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom's basements.”

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• “Corn dogs," the exorcist said, "are all the proof I need that there is a God.”

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• “I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.”

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