Patrick Ness Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Patrick Ness.
Famous Quotes By Patrick Ness
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them. — Patrick Ness
You are keeping the possibility [of peace] open. No wise leader would do anything less — Patrick Ness
Who will remember Todd?
Who will remember what he did?
Todd -
Todd -
And my heart breaks even more -
Breaks forever -
And I fall to my knees in the snow and sand -
And I yell out, wordless and empty -
And I drop the weapon. — Patrick Ness
If you're too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them. — Patrick Ness
But imagine there's this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it's there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don't know what you're talking about. — Patrick Ness
We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true. — Patrick Ness
Four lines, and the world went quiet.
I'm sorry for telling everyone about your mum, read the first line.
I miss being your friend, read the second.
Are you okay? read the third.
I see you, read the fourth, with the I underlined about a hundred times. — Patrick Ness
Mikey, she says, but not like she's about to say anything more, just like she's identifying me, making a place for me here that's mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I'm grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn't say it felt this sad. — Patrick Ness
If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. — Patrick Ness
("What did he say?" Conor asked.)
(He said enough to bring me walking, the monster said. I know injustice when I see it.) — Patrick Ness
We share out craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love. — Patrick Ness
Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story. — Patrick Ness
People say they want freedom, but what they really want is freedom from worry. If I take care of their problems, they don't mind being told what to do. — Patrick Ness
Why can't we learn to live with how we are? And whatever anybody chooses is okay by the rest of us? — Patrick Ness
The Apothecary was surprised. "You would give up everything you believed in?"
"If it would save my daughters," the parson said. "I'd give up everything. — Patrick Ness
Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about. — Patrick Ness
Without pain, it feels almost like I don't have a body at all, almost like I'm a ghost, sitting in a chair, blinded and eternal.
Like I'm dead already.
Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?
"We are the choices we make, Todd," the Mayor says. "Nothing more, nothing less. — Patrick Ness
No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky's too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?'
'And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there's so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don't get any work done because we're all looking at it too much? — Patrick Ness
I wanted him to do it, I wanted it to happen-
And it did.
I controlled him. Just like the Mayor.
I watch him go, still walking to the food store, like it was his own idea.
My hands are shaking.
Bloody hell. — Patrick Ness
There it is again, right in my head, I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME -
But this time it's different -
There's a lightness -
A breath-stealing feeling -
A weightlessness to it that makes my stomach rise -
"I give you a gift," he says, his voice floating thru my head like a cloud on fire. "The same gift I've given to my captains. Use it. Use it to defeat me. I dare you."
I look into his eyes, into the blackness of them, the blackness that swallows me whole -
I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME.
And that's all I can hear in the whole world. — Patrick Ness
There came a point when Harry stopped trying to fight back, when the blows from the monster were too strong, too many, too fast, when he began begging the monster to stop. — Patrick Ness
Even when peaceful cooperation is the obvious thing, the only thing that will keep any of us alive- There are still people who won't make that choice — Patrick Ness
But it's obvious since the beginning that wars make no sense. You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them. — Patrick Ness
The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do. — Patrick Ness
And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all. Conor — Patrick Ness
War makes monsters of men, — Patrick Ness
Schooling ain't life."
"Ain't it?" she says, her eyebrows raising in mock surprise. — Patrick Ness
Destruction is very satisfying — Patrick Ness
The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. — Patrick Ness
The yew tree is the most important of all the healing trees, it said. It lives for thousands of years. Its berries, its bark, its leaves, its sap, its pulp, its wood, they all thrum and burn and twist with life. It can cure almost any ailment man suffers from, mixed and treated by the right apothecary. — Patrick Ness
A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men. — Patrick Ness
Death is not the end. — Patrick Ness
War makes monsters of men, you once said to me Todd. Well, so does too much knowledge. Too much knowledge of your fellow man, too much knowledge of his weakness, his pathetic greed and vanity, and how laughably easy it is to control him. — Patrick Ness
Son," his father said, leaning forward. "Stories don't always have happy endings." This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect. His — Patrick Ness
Oh, it was real, all right," she says. "We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real. — Patrick Ness
The thing is, Todd, people don't really want freedom, no matter how much they might bleat on about it. — Patrick Ness
The indie kids, huh? You've got them at your school, too. That group with the cool-geek haircuts and the charity shop clothes and names from the fifties. Nice enough, never mean, but always the ones who end up being the Chosen One when the vampires come calling or when the alien queen needs the Source of All Light or something. They're too cool to ever, ever do anything like go to prom or listen to music other than jazz while reading poetry. They've always got some story going on that they're heroes of. The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part. — Patrick Ness
But I don't care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don't think they're real or important or you think that we'll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that's not really my business. I can't tell you what's real for you. But in return, you can't say what's real for me either. I get to choose. Not you. — Patrick Ness
Not everything is black and white. In fact, almost nothing is. — Patrick Ness
I was just trying to stay alive, looking for ways to find you, hoping you hadn't left me behind."
"Never," I say. "Not never."
He looks back up at me. "I'd never leave you neither."
"You promise?"
"Cross my heart, hope to die," he says, grinning shyly.
"I promise, too," I say and I smile at him. "I ain't never leaving you, Todd Hewitt, not never again. — Patrick Ness
If the world wants you, it's gonna keep on coming till it gets you. And who am I that can fix it? Who am I that can change this if the world wants it so badly? Who am I to stop the end of the world if it keeps on coming? — Patrick Ness
What are you?" Conor asked, pulling his arms closer around himself. I am not a "what," frowned the monster. I am a "who." "Who are you, then?" Conor said. The monster's eyes widened. Who am I? it said, its voice getting louder. Who am I? The — Patrick Ness
Usually when a man calls a woman a bitch," a voice calls over from a cart pulling up near us at the edge of camp,"its because she's doing something right. — Patrick Ness
History ain't so important when yer just trying to survive," I say, spitting it out under my breath. "That's actually when it's most important," Hildy says, — Patrick Ness
It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.
It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.
It's not a weakness.
It's your best strength. — Patrick Ness
Patience, she says again. But she says it impatiently. — Patrick Ness
Seth," she says, "wherever you are, it's okay. You can come back from it. Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that's not how it always looks. That's not how it's always going to look. There's more. There's always more. Whatever you see, wherever you are, we're still here with you. Me and Tommy. — Patrick Ness
Here's what I think," I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. "I think maybe everybody falls," I say. "I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking."
I pull on her arms gently to make sure she's listening.
"I think the asking is whether we get back up again. — Patrick Ness
A memory is not the thing remembered. — Patrick Ness
Roads is never the fastest way to get nowhere," the woman says. "Don't ye know that? — Patrick Ness
Here is the boy, drowning. — Patrick Ness
Worst is the one who knows better and does nothing. — Patrick Ness
I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live. — Patrick Ness
The parson refused to believe the Apothecary could help, said the monster. When times were easy, the parson nearly destroyed the Apothecary, but when the going grew tough, he was willing to throw aside every belief if it would save his daughters.
"So?" Conor said. "So would anyone! So would everyone! What did you expect him to do? — Patrick Ness
Through Hell or high water."
"It'll probably be both. — Patrick Ness
Conor shook his head. "That's a terrible story. And a cheat." It is a true story, the monster said. Many things that are true feel like a cheat. Kingdoms get the princes they deserve, farmers' daughters die for no reason, and sometimes witches merit saving. Quite often, actually. You'd be surprised. Conor — Patrick Ness
Maybe probably ain't all that comforting a word when it's maybe yer not dying. — Patrick Ness
Even though it walked and talked, even though it was bigger than his house and could swallow him in one bite, the monster was still, at the end of the day, just a yew tree. — Patrick Ness
If you speak the truth, the monster whispered in his ear, you will be able to face whatever comes. — Patrick Ness
Didn't you finish your chemistry in school?"
"You closed the school and burnt all the books."
"Ah, so I did. — Patrick Ness
Oh, forget it," he says with feeling. "Nobody knows anything. — Patrick Ness
Don't deceive me. Never leave me. — Patrick Ness
It's like a rule of life that yer automatically happier when you don't gotta worry about something. — Patrick Ness
No such thing as nothing. So it's gotta be a something, don't it? — Patrick Ness
There's always beauty," Seth murmurs. "If you know where to look. — Patrick Ness
I am everything untamed and untameable! It brought Conor up close to its eye. I am this wild earth, come for you, Conor O'Malley. — Patrick Ness
You said war should never be personal, but that's all it's ever been for me. — Patrick Ness
You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard. — Patrick Ness
It's like he's my family, except better, because I've chosen him. — Patrick Ness
He looks up and the loss in his Noise is so great it feels like I'm standing on the edge of an abyss, that I'm about to fall down into him, into blackness so empty and lonely there'd never be a way out.
"Todd," I say again, a catch in my voice. "On the ledge, under the waterfall, do you remember what you said to me? Do you remember what you said to save me?"
He's shaking his head slowly. "I've done terrible things, Viola. Terrible things-"
"We all fall, you said." I'm gripping his hand now. "We all fall but that's not what matters. What matters is picking yourself up again. — Patrick Ness
A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.
"It's a place for burying dead folk," I say.
Her eyes widen. "A place for doing what?"
"Don't people die in space?" I ask.
"Yeah," she says. "But we burn them. We don't put them in holes." She crosses her arms around herself, mouth and forehead frowning, peering around at the graves. "How can this be sanitary? — Patrick Ness
Yer calling for me son, and I will answer. — Patrick Ness
Here I am. Here we are. Here we go. Here is all that matters. — Patrick Ness
We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there'll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it's good. It's a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever. — Patrick Ness
I live in England, so I take a lot of trains, and you can't really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there's already information everywhere. — Patrick Ness
Hmm," Mistress Coyle hmms. — Patrick Ness
As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.
The rest of the world that wasn't waiting. — Patrick Ness
It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving. — Patrick Ness
Sometimes the people don't know what's best for them ... Sometimes the people have to be convinced of things that are necessary. That's what leadership is. Not shouting your head off in support of their every whim. — Patrick Ness
The purpose of a volcano is to die,' she says. 'Is this not what you strive for?'
'The purpose of a volcano is to die, my lady,' says the volcano, 'but as angrily as possible. — Patrick Ness
There Are No Ends, Only Changes. — Patrick Ness
The boy who refused to lose his soul. — Patrick Ness
We sure as ruddy heck ain't in Prentisstown no more, I say to Manchee under my breath. — Patrick Ness
Gust of British wind tousles my hair. (Top of the morning! Oh, no, wait, that's Irish.) It's — Patrick Ness
And then I hear the terrible, terrible scream that of course is the girl getting caught and that's the choice made, ain't it? — Patrick Ness
For Rachel, it might have even been worse, because she had known the rules for a long time, had thrived on them, and had maybe now - if her equally unprecedented lunch outburst was anything to go by - found them empty. — Patrick Ness
Superior numbers versus superior firepower. A recipe for unending slaughter. — Patrick Ness
Assuming a thing ain't knowing a thing. — Patrick Ness
What else do men think about except sex and enemies? — Patrick Ness
Yer the only friend I got, pigpiss ... Ain't that the biggest tragedy you ever heard? — Patrick Ness
A thing worth learning is worth learning well. — Patrick Ness
In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed. — Patrick Ness
It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again. — Patrick Ness
But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn't it?"
"Thirteen years now."
"Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong."
She finally looks at me. "Life is only that simple when you're young, my girl. — Patrick Ness