Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Everyone here is someone’s daughter,” she says quietly. “Every soldier out there is someone’s son. The only crime, the only crime is to take a life. There is nothing else.” “And that’s why you don’t fight,” I say. She turns to me sharply. “To live is to fight,” she snaps. “To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.”

— Patrick Ness

102. “Viola? Keep calling for me– And I’ll keep searching for you– And I’ll find you– You bet yer life on it– I’ll find you– Keep calling for me, Viola– Cuz here I come.”

— Patrick Ness

103. “There’s so much wonder in the world. Don’t let no one tell you otherwise.”

— Patrick Ness

104. “What a sad thing men are. Can’t do nothing good without being so weak we have to mess it up. Can’t build something up without tearing it down.”

— Patrick Ness

105. “In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.”

— Patrick Ness

106. “I hate myself so much I want to stick a knife in my heart.”

— Patrick Ness

107. “I am everything untamed and untameable! It brought Conor up close to its eye. I am this wild earth, come for you, Conor O’Malley.”

— Patrick Ness

108. “There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween. 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.”

— Patrick Ness

109. “Ah, well, then you’ve never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it’s beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains.”

— Patrick Ness

110. “The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.”

— Patrick Ness

111. “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

112. “But what is a dream, Conor O’Malley? Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?”

— Patrick Ness

113. “There ain’t nothing good that don’t got real bad waiting to follow it.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Real Quotes

114. “I’ll find you- Keep calling for me, Viola- Cuz here I come.”

— Patrick Ness

115. “You can’t say everything, so you don’t say nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

116. “Here is the boy, drowning.”

— Patrick Ness

117. “The yew tree is the most important of all the healing trees, it said. It lives for thousands of years. Its berries, its bark, its leaves, its sap, its pulp, its wood, they all thrum and burn and twist with life. It can cure almost any ailment man suffers from, mixed and treated by the right apothecary.”

— Patrick Ness

118. “As destruction goes, the monster said behind him, this is all remarkably pitiful.”

— Patrick Ness

119. “A man without a filter, is chaos walking.”

— Patrick Ness

120. “You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good.”

— Patrick Ness

121. “You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. 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

122. “Superior numbers versus superior firepower. A recipe for unending slaughter.”

— Patrick Ness

123. “Now that I’ve seen her, I can’t stop seeing her.”

— Patrick Ness

124. “Stories don’t end with the writers, however many started the race.”

— Patrick Ness

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

125. “How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?”

— Patrick Ness

126. “Not everything is black and white. In fact, almost nothing is.”

— Patrick Ness

127. “I hate myself. Almost all the time. I try not to tell anyone because I don’t want to burden them, but I feel like I’m falling farther and farther away from them. Like the well’s getting deeper and I’m running out of energy to climb it and any minute now, any second, it’s going to stop being worth even trying.”

— Patrick Ness

128. “Doing what’s right should be easy. It shouldn’t be just another big mess like everything else.”

— Patrick Ness

129. “We run down the right fork, Manchee at our heels, the night and a dusty road stretching out in front of us, an army and a disaster behind us, me and Viola, running side by side.”

— Patrick Ness

130. “What happened in the nightmare was something no one else ever needed to know. Conor.”

— Patrick Ness

131. “Flakes of white fall thru the trees and onto the road, catching on our clothes and hair. It’s a silent fall and it’s weird how it makes everything else seem quiet, too, like it’s trying to tell you a secret, a terrible, terrible secret.”

— Patrick Ness

132. “Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.”

— Patrick Ness

133. “No siempre hay un bueno. Ni siempre hay un malo. Casi todo el mundo esta en un punto intermedio.”

— Patrick Ness

134. “People see stories everywhere... That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.”

— Patrick Ness

135. “You always assume you’re the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.”

— Patrick Ness

136. “There are worse things that being invisible, the monster had said, and it was right.”

— Patrick Ness

137. “A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men.”

— Patrick Ness

138. “Being this close to her silence is like my heart breaking all over the place. I can feel it, like it’s pulling me down into a bottomless pit, like it’s calling for me to just fall and fall and fall.”

— Patrick Ness

139. “If the world wants you, it’s gonna keep on coming till it gets you. And who am I that can fix it? Who am I that can change this if the world wants it so badly? Who am I to stop the end of the world if it keeps on coming?”

— Patrick Ness

140. “His last word had been my name. The last word he heard was me speaking his own. Did this mean anything? And if it only meant something for the two of us, did that reduce it?”

— Patrick Ness

141. “They’re your parents. They’re meant to love you because. Never in spite.”

— Patrick Ness

142. “Worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

143. “Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it...”

— Patrick Ness

144. “I feel like I’m way down this deep, deep hole and I’m looking up and all there is is this little dot of light and I have to shout at the top of my lungs for anyone to hear me and even when I do, I say the wrong thing or they don’t really listen or they’re just humouring me.”

— Patrick Ness

145. “It was solitude, but it was solitude that wasn’t lonely. Solitude that could sort things out. And he hadn’t had that in ages.”

— Patrick Ness

146. “I take my rucksack and go out the opening where the front door used to be. Manchee gets up from where he’s curled and follows me. When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and fall asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog.”

— Patrick Ness

147. “I don’t want you to go,” he said, the tears dropping from his eyes, slowly at first, then spilling like a river. “I know, my love,” his mother said in her heavy voice. “I know.”

— Patrick Ness

148. “And then his noise falls completely silent- And he stops struggling- And looking right into my eyes- He dies. My Todd dies.”

— Patrick Ness

149. “Why can’t we learn to live with how we are? And whatever anybody chooses is okay by the rest of us?”

— Patrick Ness

150. “Conor blinked. Then blinked again. “You’re going to tell me stories?” Indeed, the monster said. “Well–” Conor looked around in disbelief. “How is that a nightmare?” Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.”

— Patrick Ness