Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Jarvis had to keep avoiding the increasing numbers of both rioters and fleeing citizens as well as a number of people in cars with the same idea. He was surprised to feel annoyed. Here was the first honest-to-goodness miracle he was witness to in his entire life as a clergyman and he wasn’t able to see it because he had to keep his eyes on the road. Why were the mysteries of faith so inscrutable?”

— Patrick Ness

452. “You can’t redeem him, Todd,” she says, a little softer but I flinch a bit at the word redeem. “You can’t. Because he doesn’t want it.”

— Patrick Ness

453. “But hell you make for yourself is still hell, maybe.”

— Patrick Ness

454. “A few of you are here by choice. Or at least by Switzerland.”

— Patrick Ness

455. “Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?”

— Patrick Ness

456. “So the thing to remember, the thing that’s most important of all that I might say in this here telling of things is that Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out.”

— Patrick Ness

457. “Probably for the best, though. Turns out New World’s oceans aren’t really for fishing.” “Why not?” “Oh, the fish are the size of your boat and they swim up alongside and look you in the eye and tell you how they’re going to eat you.” She laughs a little. “And then they eat you.”

— Patrick Ness

458. “But in my chest, there was still fear, and I didn’t know which kind it was. Fear with hope, or fear without it.”

— Patrick Ness

459. “Tam stands and they clear the table, taking the dishes into their kitchen and leaving me and Viola sitting there by ourselves.”

— Patrick Ness

460. “One night a whole storehouse of wheat was taken, so completely and successfully it’s obvious now there’s people in the town and the army who’ve been helping ’em. Which is bad news for the town and the army.”

— Patrick Ness

461. “I knew it,” Conor grumbled. “These kinds of stories always have stupid princes falling in love.”

— Patrick Ness

462. “The difference is that I think you never do it. Even if you’re tempted, even if you’re really close, because who knows? There might be more.”

— Patrick Ness

463. “Manchee and me are quiet as possible going past the front door of the Church. Praying Noise comes from inside, it’s got a special feel to it, a special purply sick feel like men are bleeding it out, even tho it’s always the same stuff but the purply blood just keeps on coming. Help us, save us, forgive us, help us, save us, forgive us, get us outta here, please, God, please, God, please, God, tho as far as I know no one’s never heard no Noise back from this God fella.”

— Patrick Ness

464. “They’re fighting a war over who can be more peaceful.”

— Patrick Ness

465. “A memory is not the thing remembered.”

— Patrick Ness

466. “But here, now, again, this was more than the body, or the mind, or the personality. It wasn’t holy, that was a whole other mess, but it was something that could be touched only here.”

— Patrick Ness

467. “Do you know what separates us from the beasts, Viola?’ I frowned, sensing a lesson. ‘The ability to wait to open a present?’ He laughed. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.”

— Patrick Ness

468. “A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.”

— Patrick Ness

469. “The words you say tell me you are scared of the berries, but your actions seem to suggest otherwise.”

— Patrick Ness

470. “He had loved Enzo. Loved him. And who cared if it was the love of a fifteen – and then a sixteen-year-old. Why did that make any less? They were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet. Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young.”

— Patrick Ness

471. “Except cleaner. And bossier.”

— Patrick Ness

472. “The devil always outnumbers his foes,” he said. “Even if he is alone.”

— Patrick Ness

473. “Because nothing I did with Charlie ever once felt like that kiss with Jack.”

— Patrick Ness

474. “Crazy people don’t need an explanayshun for nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

475. “But then there’s her eyes and they look at you and don’t brook no arguments, don’t look like they ever doubt themselves, even when they should. Maybe they’re the eyes of a giant after all.”

— Patrick Ness

476. “She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.”

— Patrick Ness

477. “That is what death is, a state of constant hunger, for the things you’ve left behind, for your memories, for life.”

— Patrick Ness

478. “His face is trying to look calm but everyone can hear how badly he don’t wanna die, how childlike his wishes are sounding, how loud his newly uncured Noise is spilling out all over the place.”

— Patrick Ness

479. “He’s awake,” she said, tears of joy still streaming. “Lee, Wilf. He’s awake.”

— Patrick Ness

480. “I am this wild earth, come for you.”

— Patrick Ness

481. “Was it prediction? Had she had a proper vision? Or was it a command, as it so often feels in the case of the prophetic? When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of that future do you then cause to happen?”

— Patrick Ness

482. “He is worse than the others, I show. He is worst of all of them. Because– Because he knew he was doing wrong. He felt the pain of his actions– But he did not amend them, shows the Sky. The rest are worth as much as their pack animals, I show, but worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

483. “Remember,” he says. “Hope.”

— Patrick Ness

484. “Drew missed Peter when he left, but it was like missing a hole.”

— Patrick Ness

485. “The past always fails those who grasp at it.”

— Patrick Ness

486. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

487. “A sudden, hard wind swirled up around them, and the monster spread its arms out wide, so wide they seemed to reach to opposite horizons, so wide they seemed big enough to encompass the world.”

— Patrick Ness

488. “But how are you this fine evening? – My arches are falling. – Isn’t that the first line of a sonnet?”

— Patrick Ness

489. “Why would any innocent woman object to being identified?”

— Patrick Ness

490. “You know. And if you don’t know, you don’t want to.”

— Patrick Ness

491. “The world’s a dangerous place when you don’t know enough.”

— Patrick Ness

492. “I look at the knife again, sitting there on the moss like a thing without properties, a thing made of metal as separate from a boy as can be, a thing which casts all blame from itself to the boy who uses it.”

— Patrick Ness

493. “We would have wanted you to like us. We realise now that we probably would have failed.”

— Patrick Ness