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)]