Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

205. “The boy who refused to lose his soul.”

— Patrick Ness

206. “When they were together like that, they had been their own private universe, bounded just by themselves, a population of two. They were the world, and the world was them.”

— Patrick Ness

207. “You are what you remember. You are what you hold on to.”

— Patrick Ness

208. “And at first it’s okay, you know, not perfect, but okay, and you get used to it. Then it gets a little worse, and you get used to that, too. Then one day, you wake up and you don’t have the first freakin’ clue how it got that bad.”

— Patrick Ness

209. “No, life didn’t always go how you thought it might. Sometimes it didn’t make any sense at all. You’ve just got to find a way to live there anyway...”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

211. “In a place of all this beauty and potential... we just repeat the same mistakes. Do we hate paradise so much we have to be sure it becomes a trash heap?”

— Patrick Ness

212. “The world’s ending. – Maybe sometimes it has to.”

— Patrick Ness

213. “The only place you belong is the place you can never go back to.”

— Patrick Ness

214. “Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you.”

— Patrick Ness

215. “And maybe, Adam thought, maybe hearts don’t ever stop breaking once broken. Maybe they just keep on beating, until they’re broken again, and then they keep on beating still.”

— Patrick Ness

216. “The forest was white in the snowfall, but still seemed to hold more secrets than she had ever thought possible.”

— Patrick Ness

217. “Roads is never the fastest way to get nowhere,” the woman says. “Don’t ye know that?”

— Patrick Ness

218. “You went up a girl and came down a woman.”

— Patrick Ness

219. “For a man would know the necessary choices that have to be made when one is facing one’s oblivion.”

— Patrick Ness

220. “Oh, poor little Seth, with his poor little parents who didn’t love him. You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know. Maybe your parents didn’t love you enough, and that sucks, yes, it does, but maybe it wasn’t because you were bad. Maybe it was just because the worst thing in the world had happened to them and they weren’t able to deal with it.”

— Patrick Ness

221. “The Field isn’t really much of a field, it’s more like a property plot that someone never built on because they died or lost it in a divorce or something...”

— Patrick Ness

222. “And he also knew he was going to get through it. It would be terrible. It would be beyond terrible. But he’d survive.”

— Patrick Ness

223. “It’s not the mistakes I made but how I responded to them.”

— Patrick Ness

224. “This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.”

— Patrick Ness

225. “Hmm,” Mistress Coyle hmms.”

— Patrick Ness

226. “Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It’s the worst kind of regret.”

— Patrick Ness

227. “That’s another thing about Noise. Everything that’s ever happened to you just keeps right on talking, for ever and ever.”

— Patrick Ness

228. “We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there’ll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it’s good. It’s a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.”

— Patrick Ness

229. “But that’s the risk, isn’t it? Being the best gives you nowhere to go but down. It also makes you a target, for if someone else wants to be the best, they have to beat you, don’t they?”

— Patrick Ness

230. “A feeling may or may not be true, but you still feel it.”

— Patrick Ness

231. “Sometimes you just have to feel bad about a thing. Sometimes that’s the only thing that makes you human.”

— Patrick Ness

232. “If you’re too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them.”

— Patrick Ness

233. “You imagine the devil, you make the devil.”

— Patrick Ness

234. “Sarah felt that any world that needed this many lessons must have something deeply wrong with it.”

— Patrick Ness

235. “Stories don’t always have happy endings.”

— Patrick Ness

236. “Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark -fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper -moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.”

— Patrick Ness

237. “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

238. “No one can provide the heart it’s own peace; you have to find it yourself.”

— Patrick Ness

239. “Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?”

— Patrick Ness

240. “What’s the point of lying about anything? We could keep being too afraid to say we don’t know stuff and then the future will come and eat us anyway and we’ll regret not doing all that stuff we wished we did.”

— Patrick Ness

241. “A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.”

— Patrick Ness

242. “And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.”

— Patrick Ness

243. “Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”

— Patrick Ness

244. “What kind of person am I when seen by you?”

— Patrick Ness

245. “Sometimes the people don’t know what’s best for them, Ivan,” she says. “Sometimes the people have to be convinced of things that are necessary. That’s what leadership is. Not shouting your head off in support of their every whim.”

— Patrick Ness

246. “The great trick of the devil is to make you want to see him. But it is only when you see him that you fear him. And by then, it is too late.”

— Patrick Ness

247. “A bully with charisma and top marks is still a bully. He’ll probably end up Prime Minister one day. God help us all.”

— Patrick Ness

248. “Upset isn’t the same as the world falling apart.”

— Patrick Ness

249. “It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.”

— Patrick Ness

250. “That’s a load of crap!” Conor shouted. “He didn’t need to kill her. The people were behind him. They would have followed him anyway.” The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster. And so the injustice that I saw, the reason that I came walking, was for the queen, not the prince.”

— Patrick Ness