Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “That is what death is, a state of constant hunger, for the things you’ve left behind, for your memories, for life.”

— Patrick Ness

452. “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

453. “I kept thinking, in another life, if I made different choices, it could be you and me instead.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

455. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

457. “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

458. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

459. “But you can’t make war personal,” I say, “or you’ll never make the right decisions.” “And if you didn’t make personal decisions, you wouldn’t be a person.”

— Patrick Ness

460. “Just because my thoughts and feelings don’t spill out into the world in a shout that never stops doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”

— Patrick Ness

461. “But the thing about good ideas is that they grow other ideas. Almost before I could help it, Siobhan’s ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

463. “You could pretty much eat dinner off the glare she gives me. “I’ll thank you not to talk to your elders that way, boy.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

465. “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

466. “That’s for the Captain to know,” Treasure snapped, and if my story makes her seem unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up, that’s because she was unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

468. “If she needed him, he’d be there instantly, no questions asked, and he knew she’d do the same. She was here now. They had their bulgogi. This is what a family was. Or should be.”

— Patrick Ness

469. “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

470. “Except cleaner. And bossier.”

— Patrick Ness

471. “Although doesn’t really matter how many time you do it: you think it’s going to make your life less lonely, but it never does.”

— Patrick Ness

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

475. “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

476. “You just got days, it seemed to her. Where stuff happened or it didn’t. Where planning just showed you what a fool you were to think you had any say over what your life would be.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

478. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

480. “A peace that blacked yer eye,” I say. “A peace that split yer lip.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

482. “Doing what’s right should be easy.”

— Patrick Ness

483. “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

484. “Yes,’ said Jasper, flatly, ’and it was very illuminating. It is, perhaps, less illuminating now.”

— Patrick Ness

485. “Que importaria la distancia si solo fuera un sueno.”

— Patrick Ness

486. “Sheep got even less to say than dogs do.”

— Patrick Ness

487. “And so he waited by himself, leaning against a stone wall away from the other kids as they squealed and laughed and looked at their phones as if nothing in the world was wrong, as if nothing in the whole entire universe could ever happen to them.”

— Patrick Ness

488. “Men and their Noise. I don’t know how they do it, how they stand each other.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

490. “The fact that she was a young female with Noise was enough to stun him for a moment. Human women didn’t have it, of course, something that had caused no end of difficulty, given how eager humans were to be outraged about difference.”

— Patrick Ness

491. “Well, Adam thought. I’ve had my mouth on his bare skin. That seemed to be effective.”

— Patrick Ness

492. “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

493. “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