Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 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. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

264. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

267. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

272. “The sun’s well up now and the sky as blue as fresh meat.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

277. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

283. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

285. “You’d have thought so, but it was just a phase, wasn’t it? Nothing that churchgoing and pretending it never happened wouldn’t make go away.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

288. “I can’t stand it anymore!” he cried out as the fire raged around him. “I can’t stand knowing that she’ll go! I just want it to be over! I want it to be finished!” And.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

291. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

297. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

300. “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