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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

208. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

210. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

221. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

233. “Hmm,” Mistress Coyle hmms.”

— Patrick Ness

234. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

237. “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

238. “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

239. “People ask for what they need in different ways. Sometimes by not even asking for it at all.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

241. “Most Gods don’t care. About anything. Other than gaining dominance over other Gods and telling you how wonderful they are and demanding that you say the same. There’s nothing like a bunch of Gods to show you how alone you really are.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

248. “No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version.”

— Patrick Ness

249. “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

250. “There’s hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall. And maybe it don’t hurt so much after all.”

— Patrick Ness