Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “You did this to me,” I say, still trembling. “You put it in my head and made me–” “I did no such thing,” he says. “I merely showed you the path. You walked down it all by yourself.”

— 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. “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

354. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

357. “The knife is alive. As long as I hold it, as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will.”

— Patrick Ness

358. “There was a small park across from the hospital with paths among the trees. As Conor and his father walked through it toward an empty bench, they kept passing patients in hospital gowns, walking with families or out on their own sneaking cigarettes. It made the park feel like an outdoor hospital room. Or a place where ghosts went to have a break.”

— Patrick Ness

359. “So Malcolm stepped out of the trees and met Nelson, and the fate of billions was changed.”

— Patrick Ness

360. “Not one of them lifting a hand to save theirselves from what’s coming, hoping if they’re meek enough, if they’re weak enough, then the monster won’t eat ’em.”

— Patrick Ness

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “Isn’t dying once enough? he thinks. Am I going to have to keep doing it? But then he thinks, No. Because you can die before you’re dead, too.”

— Patrick Ness

365. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

372. “You could pretty much eat dinner off the glare she gives me. “I’ll thank you not to talk to your elders that way, boy.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

374. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

379. “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

380. “What if, on some level, way down deep inside, right down to the very simplest, purified form of who he was, what if he was corrupted? What if there was some tiny, tiny fault in the first building blocks of who he was, and everything since that moment of life was just papering over an essential crack? And he was just a carapace built on a facade built on scaffolding and there was no real core to him, no real central worth? At all?”

— Patrick Ness

381. “His chest still burned, so much he couldn’t tell where the anger stopped and the wound began.”

— Patrick Ness

382. “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

383. “He saved me from Prentisstown,” Viola speaks up. “If it hadn’t been for him–” “Shut up, girl,” says the beard. “Now’s not really the time for women to be talking, Vi,” Doctor Snow says.”

— Patrick Ness

384. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

386. “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

387. “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

388. “But the thing about good ideas is that they grow other ideas. Almost before I could help it, Siobhan’s ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and 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

389. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and falls asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

397. “Que importaria la distancia si solo fuera un sueno.”

— Patrick Ness

398. “Sheep got even less to say than dogs do.”

— Patrick Ness

399. “And so he waited by himself, leaning against a stone wall away from the other kids as they squealed and laughed and looked at their phones as if nothing in the world was wrong, as if nothing in the whole entire universe could ever happen to them.”

— Patrick Ness

400. “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