Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You tell a man the truth about himself and, well, they find they have trouble accepting it.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

153. “I just stand there like a doofus wondering just what in the effing blazes is going on.”

— Patrick Ness

154. “There aren’t any more treatments.” “I’m sorry, son,” his mum said, tears sneaking out of her eyes now, even though she kept up her smile. “I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life.” Conor.”

— Patrick Ness

155. “That’s the thing I’m learning about being thrown out on yer own. Nobody does nothing for you. If you don’t change it, it don’t get changed.”

— Patrick Ness

156. “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

157. “The green things of this world are just wondrous, aren’t they? We work so hard to get rid of them when sometimes they’re the very thing that saves us.”

— Patrick Ness

158. “How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?”

— Patrick Ness

159. “It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worth part of being young. So many of your decisions aren’t yours; they’re made by other people. Sometimes they’re made badly by other people. Sometimes they’re made by other people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. The bastards.”

— Patrick Ness

160. “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 without tearing it down. It ain’t the Spackle that drove us to the end. It was ourselves.”

— Patrick Ness

161. “I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it’s true, but who knows?”

— Patrick Ness

162. “Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it’s pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.”

— Patrick Ness

163. “What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?”

— Patrick Ness

164. “It’s always nice when two people who don’t got no one else find each other as friends.”

— Patrick Ness

165. “To allow someone, anyone, to suffer is the greatest sin there is.”

— Patrick Ness

166. “Time goes on, even when yer not looking.”

— Patrick Ness

167. “And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing. Each of us knowing the other.”

— Patrick Ness

168. “A bully with charisma and top marks is still a bully.”

— Patrick Ness

169. “Maybe probably ain’t all that comforting a word when it’s maybe yer not dying.”

— Patrick Ness

170. “If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.”

— Patrick Ness

171. “The sound when we crash is so loud it’s almost impossible.”

— Patrick Ness

172. “People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “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.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”

— Patrick Ness

173. “Midnight passes and I’m twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.”

— Patrick Ness

174. “A man is capable of thought. A crowd is not.”

— Patrick Ness

175. “It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.”

— Patrick Ness

176. “The attractiveness of power is something you should learn about before you get too much older, it’s the thing that separates men from boys, tho not in the way most men think.”

— Patrick Ness

177. “Sometimes the rumour of an army is just as effective as the army itself.”

— Patrick Ness

178. “We’re just as screwed up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.”

— Patrick Ness

179. “Faith is belief without proof,” Malcom said. “It’s a leap, an act of bravery. If I had proof, I would have no reason to Believe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reaped benefit of that faith.”

— Patrick Ness

180. “The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.”

— Patrick Ness

181. “All stories begin before they start and never, ever finish.”

— Patrick Ness

182. “If you ever see a war,” she says, not lookng up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.”

— Patrick Ness

183. “La creencia es la mitad de toda curacion.”

— Patrick Ness

184. “But wherever I am, whatever this world is, I’ve just got to be sure I’m me and that’s what’s real... Know yourself and go in swinging. If it hurts when you hit it, it might be real, too.”

— Patrick Ness

185. “I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.”

— Patrick Ness

186. “But, somehow, Wilf knows. Somehow, Wilf always knows.”

— Patrick Ness

187. “I am not your enemy, Todd Hewitt,” he says one more time. “Just tell me her name and this will all stop.” I.”

— Patrick Ness

188. “There was a glass-fronted cabinet opposite, filled with plates on display stands and teacups with so many curlicues it was a wonder you could drink from them without cutting your lips.”

— Patrick Ness

189. “This is why I came walking, to tell you this so that you may heal. You must listen. Conor swallowed again. “I’m listening.” You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. There.”

— Patrick Ness

190. “And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully. And it took the lives of his daughters.”

— Patrick Ness

191. “Mel lets us in the house, and we aren’t two steps inside before Mary Magdalene, our tubby little orange cat, is running a purring streak around Jared’s legs. He touches her nose lightly with his finger. “I see you,” he whispers, and Mary Mags does an ecstatic lopsided spin to the floor, like a falling propeller.”

— Patrick Ness

192. “What are you?” Conor asked, pulling his arms closer around himself. I am not a “what,” frowned the monster. I am a “who.” “Who are you, then?” Conor said. The monster’s eyes widened. Who am I? it said, its voice getting louder. Who am I? The.”

— Patrick Ness

193. “Because I’m not blind to how Harry works, you know,” she said. “A bully with a charisma and top marks is still a bully.” She sighed, annoyed. “He’ll probably end up Prime Minister one day. God help us all.”

— Patrick Ness

194. “I wonder if realizing you’re not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown up?”

— Patrick Ness

195. “We’re all college prep, so most of the hard work had to be done early enough to prove to colleges we’d be worth indebting ourselves forever to them.”

— Patrick Ness

196. “No todos en la vida somos buenos o malos, casi todos estamos en un punto medio.”

— Patrick Ness

197. “Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.”

— Patrick Ness

198. “They want us a bit dumb and a bit afraid. Which for the most part, I think we are.”

— Patrick Ness

199. “There’s more than this, Sethy,” Gudmund said. “This sucks beyond belief, but there’s more. We just have to get there.”

— Patrick Ness

200. “La vida no la escribes con palabras, la escribes con acciones.”

— Patrick Ness