Patrick Ness Quotes

Patrick Ness Quotes

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.

... a good idea always attracts other good ideas.

We would do what we must. The world is big. Surely there is a space in it for one like you and one like me.

We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.

You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know.

Being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.

You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

You won't," says the Mayor, smiling again. "Everyone knows you aren't a killer, Todd."
He pushes Viola forward again -
She calls out from the pain of it -
Viola, I think -
Viola -
I grit my teeth and raise the rifle -
I cock it -
And I say what's true -
"I would kill to save her," I say.

And then his noise falls completely silent-

And he stops struggling-

And looking right into my eyes-

He dies.

My Todd dies.

Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, too, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

Who cares even if I didn't?!" Conor shouted back. "They're just stupid berries. Woo-hoo, so scary. Oh, please, please, save me from the berries!"
The monster looked at him quizzically. How strange, it said. The words you say tell me you are scared of the berries, but your actions seems to suggest otherwise.

And she says, “Then let’s just take the effing road and get ourselves to Haven.”
I smile, a little. “You said effing,” I say. “You actually said the word effing.

Ow, Todd? Ow?

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

I don't believe in guardian angels," Regine says seriously. "Just people who are there for you and people who aren't

Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

Submit! Juliet's Joy screeches underneath him at no one in particular.
"I've got to get a new horse," the Mayor mutters.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."

[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]

I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.' He shakes his head. 'And there was more. I just couldn't see it.

War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

You said war should never be personal, but that’s all it’s ever been for me.

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you.

That's the thing I'm learning about being thrown out on yer own. Nobody does nothing for you. If you don't change it, it don't get changed.

I don't think it's about making us fall. It's about how we get up again.

HERE
It’s-
Can I say?
It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.

And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.

And what exactly do you think this proves?" he spits. "You've got power, but you don't know what to do with it."
VIOLA
"Looks like I'm doing fine," I say.

Stories are the wildest things of all. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

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.

So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"
And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say.
"Always," I say to him. "Every time.

Do you not wonder sometimes, she showed now, sadly, if in some ways they are correct? That we are asking too much of the world?
“No,” he said. “They’re the ones who are asking for too little.

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