Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Old world’s mucky, violent, and crowded,” Hildy says, wiping her face with a napkin, “a-splitting right into bits with people a-hating each other and a-killing each other, no one happy till everyone’s miserable.”

— Patrick Ness

252. “There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

254. “Francia don’t look too convinced. I never seen arms so crossed.”

— Patrick Ness

255. “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

256. “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

257. “That was how the world worked, wasn’t it? You set your sights on something, and life came along with a sucker punch.”

— Patrick Ness

258. “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

259. “That was Gudmund’s biggest fault. That he couldn’t be anyone’s everything. But that he’d try anyway.”

— Patrick Ness

260. “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

261. “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

262. “Knowing the future is part of that future’s past. Perhaps the foreseen happens because we try to change it.”

— Patrick Ness

263. “I thought I had more. I thought Gudmund was my more. It didn’t matter how crap everything else was. The stuff with Owen, The stuff with my parents, even later with the stuff at school. I could live with all of that, because I had him. He was mine and no one else’s. We lived in this private world, that no one else knew about and no one else ever lived in.”

— Patrick Ness

264. “That’s the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other for once.”

— Patrick Ness

265. “I’d keep my eyes open, remember who I was, and go in swinging.”

— Patrick Ness

266. “We’re each other’s questions, aren’t we? The question that never gets an answer.”

— Patrick Ness

267. “If you hear what I say and still wish yourself there, wish yourself a hero, wish yourself a hunter, then either I have failed in my telling or you are a fool.”

— Patrick Ness

268. “I love that you’re worried,′ she says, ’but you’re worried about all the wrong things.”

— Patrick Ness

269. “He didn’t want to go and look. But at the same time, a part of him wanted to look more than anything.”

— Patrick Ness

270. “Prophecy is slippery, dangerous, open to fatal misinterpretation.”

— Patrick Ness

271. “He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it firsthand.”

— Patrick Ness

272. “Why die before you die? Your father and I have done something daring for probably the first time since we got married.”

— Patrick Ness

273. “I’m happy. Which is the weirdest thing of all.”

— Patrick Ness

274. “I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Regine says seriously. “Just people who are there for you and people who aren’t.”

— Patrick Ness

275. “This is how we are protecting you, by getting you out.”

— Patrick Ness

276. “Children are, though, the last to be consulted on issues of their own welfare, so our opinions went unheard.”

— Patrick Ness

277. “They’re weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more. More and more and more. Sometimes.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

279. “Will the world end in darkness because it is foretold? Or because there will be those who believe it so strongly they will make it so?”

— Patrick Ness

280. “There’s so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it’s so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you’re free to choose any one you like. – Patrick Ness on Libraries.”

— Patrick Ness

281. “He was the thing the world had suffered from most in her four billion years of existence: a stupid man with power.”

— Patrick Ness

282. “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

283. “If you can’t pray it away, it’s not a real problem.”

— Patrick Ness

284. “Early Christians thought your soul was in your stomach,” I say.”

— Patrick Ness

285. “Is it because hope is scary?’ my father asked. I looked back at him, startled. ‘You think so, too?’ He smiled, full of love. ‘Hope is terrifying, Viola,’ he said. ‘No one wants to admit it, but it is.’ I feel my eyes go wet again. ‘Then how can you stand it? How can you bear even thinking it? It feels so dangerous, like you’ll be punished for even thinking you deserved it.’ He touched my arm, just lightly. ‘Because, Viola, life is so much more terrifying without it.”

— Patrick Ness

286. “If war is hard – and it is, forever and always – then after war is just as hard, in a different way.”

— Patrick Ness

287. “It was not wrong, the monster said, It was only a thought, one of a million. It was not an action.”

— Patrick Ness

288. “You looked like a half-literate moron in that letter, like an anti-intellectual jackanapes trying to stampede his way into power with all the finesse of a lovestruck buffalo.”

— Patrick Ness

289. “Funny how you can forget that every family isn’t like yours.”

— Patrick Ness

290. “Because even the one you hate leaves an absence when they go.”

— Patrick Ness

291. “She looks at me. She does. She.”

— Patrick Ness

292. “And that would be the end. So many ends.”

— Patrick Ness

293. “You’re helpless to the behaviour but the effort involved is just unbelievable.”

— Patrick Ness

294. “Maybe there didn’t have to be any other reasons. Maybe love made you stupid. Maybe loneliness did.”

— Patrick Ness

295. “Doesn’t a part of you think you’re making a big deal out of not very much? That if you were somehow not so weak, you could be happy and free just like everyone else?”

— Patrick Ness

296. “You said war should never be personal, but that’s all it’s ever been for me.”

— Patrick Ness

297. “Mikey,” she says, but not like she’s about to say anything more, just like she’s identifying me, making a place for me here that’s mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I’m grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn’t say it felt this sad.”

— Patrick Ness

298. “Manchee gets up from where he’s curled and follows me. When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and falls asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog. I.”

— Patrick Ness

299. “We must do this. It has been prophesied.′ You relieve yourself of choice. Relieve yourself of consequences. Torture me, harm me, kill me. Do all these things, but do not pretend there is a must. That is how evil is rationalised.”

— Patrick Ness

300. “Give him numbers, he’s great. Give him words and sentences to put together and his forehead creases down so you can see exactly what he’ll look like when he’s eighty.”

— Patrick Ness