Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

453. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

455. “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

456. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

458. “Except cleaner. And bossier.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

460. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

467. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

470. “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

471. “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

472. “Remember,” he says. “Hope.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

474. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

478. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

481. “I’m too busy repeatedly counting ketchup bottles and wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead.”

— Patrick Ness

482. “Death is suddenly objectionable to you when the dead has a name you know?”

— Patrick Ness

483. “We negotiated peace with them the first time, my girl, because we were in a position of strength. That’s how wars work, that’s how truces work. We show them we’ve got more power than they imagine and they’re more willing to make peace.”

— Patrick Ness

484. “I can’t tell you what’s real for you. But in return, you can’t say what’s real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.”

— Patrick Ness

485. “The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all? Swamp.”

— Patrick Ness

486. “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

487. “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

488. “Her settlement, for example, were peaceable and as the calls to war had remained voluntary, they had held back, hoping it would pass. Nevertheless, they had cursed her for wanting to leave with him, telling her of the atrocities committed by his people out in the west. They had turned their backs on her in disgust when she told them he was a person, not a whole people.”

— Patrick Ness

489. “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

490. “Soothe your throats. Injustice has not followed you here.”

— Patrick Ness

491. “Hope is terrifying, Viola,” he said. “No one wants to admit it, but it is.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness