Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not how we fall. It’s how we get back up again.”

— Patrick Ness

2. “We are the choices we make.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Accountability Quotes, Decision-Making Quotes

3. “Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”

— Patrick Ness

4. “Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”

— Patrick Ness

5. “Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Thought Provoking Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Library Quotes

6. “And it feels like, finally.”

— Patrick Ness

7. “I wish I had a hundred years, she said, very quietly. A hundred years I could give to you.”

— Patrick Ness

8. “Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

10. “To live is to fight, to preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.”

— Patrick Ness

11. “There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.”

— Patrick Ness

12. “Things change, but they stay the same.”

— Patrick Ness

13. “To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.”

— Patrick Ness

14. “We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren’t anything else.”

— Patrick Ness

15. “Don’t deceive me. Never leave me.”

— Patrick Ness

16. “Here I am. Here we are. Here we go. Here is all that matters.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “We all fall but that’s not what matters. What matters is picking yourself up again.”

— Patrick Ness

19. “We don’t say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can’t say everything, so you don’t say nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

20. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Real Quotes

21. “War makes monsters out of men.”

— Patrick Ness

22. “Life ain’t fair. It ain’t. Not never.”

— Patrick Ness

23. “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

24. “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?”

— Patrick Ness

25. “Choices may be unbelievably hard but they’re never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that’s not how a person with integrity acts.”

— Patrick Ness

26. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”

— Patrick Ness

27. “Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits. And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully.”

— Patrick Ness

28. “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

29. “Conor held tightly onto his mother. And by doing so, he could finally let her go.”

— Patrick Ness

30. “Faith with proof is no faith at all.”

— Patrick Ness

31. “Know yourself and go in swinging.”

— Patrick Ness

32. “Everything’s always ending. But everything’s always beginning, too.”

— Patrick Ness

33. “The only place you belong is the place you can never go back. And so yer always alone, forever and always.”

— Patrick Ness

34. “There’s always beauty, if you know where to look.”

— Patrick Ness

35. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

36. “I am Todd Hewitt, I think to myself with my eyes closed. I am twelve years and twelve months old. I live in Prentisstown on New World. I will be a man in one month’s time exactly.”

— Patrick Ness

37. “So the good prince was a murderer and the evil queen wasn’t a witch after all.”

— Patrick Ness

38. “Teenagers are the greatest readers in the world – honest, unsnobby and loyal.”

— Patrick Ness

39. “Never trust a politician, Todd. They have no fixed center, so you can never believe them.”

— Patrick Ness

40. “And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside me. And i fall back into it.”

— Patrick Ness

41. “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

42. “A knife is only as good as the one who wields it.”

— Patrick Ness

43. “Don’t think you haven’t lived long enough to have a story to tell.”

— Patrick Ness

44. “Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.”

— Patrick Ness

45. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

46. “The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.”

— Patrick Ness

47. “It is a true story, the monster said. Many things that are true feel like a cheat.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

48. “I promised to keep on going but maybe keep on going means coming back first.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

49. “Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “A thing worth learning is worth learning well.”

— Patrick Ness