Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

253. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

258. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

264. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

269. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

271. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

275. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

278. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

286. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

295. “The Land looks deep inside itself to find the new Sky and there is no refusal for the one chosen. The past life is over and must be left behind, for the Land needs its Sky to watch over it and the Sky can have no other than the Land.”

— Patrick Ness

296. “Do all these things, but do not pretend there is a must. That is how evil is rationalized.”

— Patrick Ness

297. “Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.”

— Patrick Ness

298. “And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all.”

— Patrick Ness

299. “Now that I know there’s more? I want to have more. If there really is more to life, I want to live all of it. And why shouldn’t all of us? Don’t we deserve that?”

— Patrick Ness

300. “But I begin to wonder if doubt is better than the wrong knowledge.”

— Patrick Ness