Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— Patrick Ness

202. “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

203. “Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.”

— Patrick Ness

204. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

206. “I do it all the time now, reaching for the silence, making the thoughts and memories go away, and most of the time it works on the outside, too.”

— Patrick Ness

207. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

222. “Hmm,” Mistress Coyle hmms.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

229. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

238. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

241. “But when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too.”

— Patrick Ness

242. “Yer calling for me son, and I will answer.”

— Patrick Ness

243. “And we dream the same in my town as you probably do in a city. We yearn the same, wish the same. We’re just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.”

— Patrick Ness

244. “But Jesus, people need, you know? I know that. They need things and they don’t know why, they just need them.”

— Patrick Ness

245. “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.” She shakes her head in a happy way. “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

246. “Little girls aren’t naturally lost,” Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. “Someone makes them that way.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

248. “Every gay has to have their years in a huge coastal city. It’s like a law.”

— Patrick Ness

249. “He was still alive. Which was the worst thing that could have happened.”

— Patrick Ness

250. “People break, I guess. Everyone.”

— Patrick Ness