Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “When luck ain’t with you, it’s against you.”

— Patrick Ness

402. “Rewards, my tender pigpiss.”

— Patrick Ness

403. “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

404. “Las historias son lo mas salvaje de todo.”

— Patrick Ness

405. “Need a poo, Todd.” “Shut up, Manchee.” “Poo. Poo, Todd.” “I said shut it.”

— Patrick Ness

406. “It was almost over. He was almost there. He had never, not once in his life, felt this powerful.”

— Patrick Ness

407. “E se nessuno ti vede, esisti davvero?”

— Patrick Ness

408. “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

409. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

411. “I kept thinking, in another life, if I made different choices, it could be you and me instead.”

— Patrick Ness

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

418. “Why would any innocent woman object to being identified?”

— Patrick Ness

419. “So the thing to remember, the thing that’s most important of all that I might say in this here telling of things is that Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a difference twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out.”

— Patrick Ness

420. “That’s for the Captain to know,” Treasure snapped, and if my story makes her seem unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up, that’s because she was unpleasant and paranoid and a suck-up.”

— Patrick Ness

421. “The words you say tell me you are scared of the berries, but your actions seem to suggest otherwise.”

— Patrick Ness

422. “If she needed him, he’d be there instantly, no questions asked, and he knew she’d do the same. She was here now. They had their bulgogi. This is what a family was. Or should be.”

— Patrick Ness

423. “He had loved Enzo. Loved him. And who cared if it was the love of a fifteen – and then a sixteen-year-old. Why did that make any less? They were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet. Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young.”

— Patrick Ness

424. “Except cleaner. And bossier.”

— Patrick Ness

425. “Although doesn’t really matter how many time you do it: you think it’s going to make your life less lonely, but it never does.”

— Patrick Ness

426. “I think maybe everybody falls,” I say. “I think maybe we all do. And I don’t think that’s the asking.” I pull on her arms gently to make sure she’s listening. “I think the asking is whether we get back up again.”

— Patrick Ness

427. “Jarvis had to keep avoiding the increasing numbers of both rioters and fleeing citizens as well as a number of people in cars with the same idea. He was surprised to feel annoyed. Here was the first honest-to-goodness miracle he was witness to in his entire life as a clergyman and he wasn’t able to see it because he had to keep his eyes on the road. Why were the mysteries of faith so inscrutable?”

— Patrick Ness

428. “The past always fails those who grasp at it.”

— Patrick Ness

429. “You can’t redeem him, Todd,” she says, a little softer but I flinch a bit at the word redeem. “You can’t. Because he doesn’t want it.”

— Patrick Ness

430. “You just got days, it seemed to her. Where stuff happened or it didn’t. Where planning just showed you what a fool you were to think you had any say over what your life would be.”

— Patrick Ness

431. “But hell you make for yourself is still hell, maybe.”

— Patrick Ness

432. “Manchee and me are quiet as possible going past the front door of the Church. Praying Noise comes from inside, it’s got a special feel to it, a special purply sick feel like men are bleeding it out, even tho it’s always the same stuff but the purply blood just keeps on coming. Help us, save us, forgive us, help us, save us, forgive us, get us outta here, please, God, please, God, please, God, tho as far as I know no one’s never heard no Noise back from this God fella.”

— Patrick Ness

433. “They’re fighting a war over who can be more peaceful.”

— Patrick Ness

434. “A peace that blacked yer eye,” I say. “A peace that split yer lip.”

— Patrick Ness

435. “I am this wild earth, come for you.”

— Patrick Ness

436. “Doing what’s right should be easy.”

— Patrick Ness

437. “Was it prediction? Had she had a proper vision? Or was it a command, as it so often feels in the case of the prophetic? When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of that future do you then cause to happen?”

— Patrick Ness

438. “Yes,’ said Jasper, flatly, ’and it was very illuminating. It is, perhaps, less illuminating now.”

— Patrick Ness

439. “Men and their Noise. I don’t know how they do it, how they stand each other.”

— Patrick Ness

440. “Tam stands and they clear the table, taking the dishes into their kitchen and leaving me and Viola sitting there by ourselves.”

— Patrick Ness

441. “The fact that she was a young female with Noise was enough to stun him for a moment. Human women didn’t have it, of course, something that had caused no end of difficulty, given how eager humans were to be outraged about difference.”

— Patrick Ness

442. “Well, Adam thought. I’ve had my mouth on his bare skin. That seemed to be effective.”

— Patrick Ness

443. “One night a whole storehouse of wheat was taken, so completely and successfully it’s obvious now there’s people in the town and the army who’ve been helping ’em. Which is bad news for the town and the army.”

— Patrick Ness

444. “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

445. “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.”

— Patrick Ness

446. “Soothe your throats. Injustice has not followed you here.”

— Patrick Ness

447. “Why did you butt in when it was none of your business?”

— Patrick Ness

448. “There Are No Ends, Only Changes.”

— Patrick Ness

449. “You know. And if you don’t know, you don’t want to.”

— Patrick Ness

450. “Probably for the best, though. Turns out New World’s oceans aren’t really for fishing.” “Why not?” “Oh, the fish are the size of your boat and they swim up alongside and look you in the eye and tell you how they’re going to eat you.” She laughs a little. “And then they eat you.”

— Patrick Ness