Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

108. “Here is the boy, drowning.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

111. “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

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. “I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

120. “Not everyone has to be the Chosen One. Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing the things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

123. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

139. “How do you know yer alive if you don’t hurt?”

— Patrick Ness

140. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Dogs don’t got the problems of people. Dogs can be happy any old time.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

146. “Many things that are true feel like a cheat.”

— Patrick Ness

147. “They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don’t know how to find it, if you don’t even know where to begin to look. – on librarians.”

— Patrick Ness

148. “His absence is so big it’s like he’s there.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness