Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “But then she thinks, feels, reaches out, and knowing exactly what blame is – a human construct, one of its blackest and more selfish and self-blinding – she can find further strands of it, emanating in all directions, for blame is something that is shared but denied in equal measure.”

— Patrick Ness

352. “The key is never sheer numbers. The key is the correct catalyst. A pebble can start a landslide and the boulders have no say in the matter as they tumble down the hill.”

— Patrick Ness

353. “And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her. Conor nodded, barely able to speak.”

— Patrick Ness

354. “You told me, just now, just today, that you’d rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don’t think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it’s fake?”

— Patrick Ness

355. “We’d all met in the office and told the vice principal – who, like all vice principals, is genetically Nazi – what we’d seen. He.”

— Patrick Ness

356. “Salvation is as easy as chicken wings, I guess.”

— Patrick Ness

357. “And now it’s time to hand the baton on to you. Stories don’t end with the writers, however many started the race. Here’s what Siobhan and I came up with. So go. Run with it. Make trouble.”

— Patrick Ness

358. “People began to live ON the earth rather than WITHIN it.”

— Patrick Ness

359. “You think I tell you stories to teach you lessons? the monster said. You think I have come walking out of time and earth itself to teach you a lesson in niceness? It laughed louder and louder again, until the ground was shaking and it felt like the sky itself might tumble down.”

— Patrick Ness

360. “Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.”

— Patrick Ness

361. “The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.”

— Patrick Ness

362. “Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.”

— Patrick Ness

363. “It has nothing to do with not trusting you. It’s to do with what something becomes once you tell it. It’s like it’s truer. And it’s got a life of its own and it rushes out into the world and becomes something you can’t control.”

— Patrick Ness

364. “So go. Run with it. Make trouble.”

— Patrick Ness

365. “I have had as many names as there are years to time itself! roared the monster. I am Herne the Hunter! I am Cernunnos! I am the eternal Green Man!”

— Patrick Ness

366. “I’d heard there were some gay girls in senior year who were dating each other right out in the open. But not any boys. Its different for boys. I mean, everybody knows somebody gay – duh, it’s not 1980 or something – but not at school. At school, it was a secret, and you were on your own.”

— Patrick Ness

367. “But there are harder things than being invisible, it said.”

— Patrick Ness

368. “I look up to him. His face and his Noise are as blank as I remember but the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man’s mind ain’t knowing the man.”

— Patrick Ness

369. “A woman my age, living alone,” she said, at least once a day, “if I don’t keep on top of things, who will?”

— Patrick Ness

370. “Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You’re responsible for its consequences, you’re responsible for treating it. But Michael, you’re not responsible for causing it.”

— Patrick Ness

371. “Y si nadie te ve, se puede decir que estes ahi?”

— Patrick Ness

372. “Then he did it a bit more. “I don’t understand. Who’s the good guy here?” There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween.”

— Patrick Ness

373. “My parents believed that baby talk and avoiding topics was almost child abuse. That you’d end up raising swaddled little morons to send out into the world to be eaten alive. I preferred it when adults expected me to teach up to them rather than always leaning down to me.”

— Patrick Ness

374. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

375. “She’s always saying that being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.” She catches my eye. “Which is something I believe, too.”

— Patrick Ness

376. “But there’s always hope,” Ben says. “You always have to hope.”

— Patrick Ness

377. “For there are devils in the deep but worse are the ones we make.”

— Patrick Ness

378. “One minute I’m standing there behind everyone and the next thing I know, I’m between Matthew and Viola, I have my knife out pointing at him, my own Noise falling like an avalanche and my mouth saying, “You best take two steps away from her and you best be taking ’em right quick.”

— Patrick Ness

379. “The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything seem heavy and impossible, like he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did.”

— Patrick Ness

380. “You needed to know it, but for the rest of this, I’m choosing my own story. Because if you can’t do that, you might as well just give up.”

— Patrick Ness

381. “Despair was one thing, despair had a component of energy, despair grappled and fought, despair needed you alive to feel its pain, but sadness, sadness was something else altogether. Sadness was a slow vampire. Sadness reached in and uncorked you like a full tub. Sadness was the parasite that killed its host.”

— Patrick Ness

382. “He walked on angrily to school. He blamed Lily because it was mostly her fault, wasn’t it? He blamed Lily, because who else was there?”

— Patrick Ness

383. “We work so hard to get rid of them when sometimes they’re the very thing that saves us.”

— Patrick Ness

384. “I am the Circle and the Circle is me.”

— Patrick Ness

385. “He’s battling the Mayor, across some kind of sand-covered square in front of what looks like a chapel– And I get a sinking feeling of how many terrible things have happened to me and Todd in churches.”

— Patrick Ness

386. “Physical beauty, of all the curses, was obviously the best you could get. It was still a curse though.”

— Patrick Ness

387. “Son,” his father said, leaning forward. “Stories don’t always have happy endings.” This stopped him. Because they didn’t, did they? That’s one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect. His.”

— Patrick Ness

388. “There’s peace to be found in doing something for yourself.”

— Patrick Ness

389. “Mrs. Mitchell,” Henna greets, her voice three sizes smaller than a minute ago.”

— Patrick Ness

390. “I don’t think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it’s fake?”

— Patrick Ness

391. “It had been amazing. Just utterly, utterly amazing, like that whole summer before senior year had been, when everything had seemed possible, when everything good felt like it was just within reach for once, when if he could just hang in there, it really would finally all come together.”

— Patrick Ness

392. “The word morgue suddenly flashes somewhere deep inside him – for where else are you laid out on cool, solid blocks – and in rising horror, he opens his eyes, unaware they were even closed.”

— Patrick Ness

393. “He knew she wouldn’t be in there – he couldn’t hear the kettle boiling, which she always did first thing – but he’d found himself asking for her a lot lately when he entered rooms in the house.”

— Patrick Ness

394. “Is it not a shame,” she says, “that we must wait until the end of the world for all boundaries to fall?”

— Patrick Ness

395. “Youth is a form of mental illness.”

— Patrick Ness

396. “You must release me or you will never be released.”

— Patrick Ness

397. “How did there get to be ‘sides’? You said the guards were on our ‘side’. How did that happen? How did I end up on a ‘side’? – I can’t really explain. Things just happen. Over time, they accumulate. Bad attracts bad. Good attracts good. Eventually there are sides. The members flux, sometimes the boundaries are gray. Good and bad are sometimes not the point. It happens.”

— Patrick Ness

398. “The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.”

— Patrick Ness

399. “Rewards, my tender pigpiss.”

— Patrick Ness

400. “He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next. But he is certain that that’s actually the point. If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means. If it isn’t a story, then the exact same is true.”

— Patrick Ness