Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

403. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

405. “You may have no choice.” “There’s always a choice,” Viola says by my side. “Oh, people like to say that,” the Mayor says. “It makes them feel better.”

— Patrick Ness

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

409. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

410. “I knew it,” Conor grumbled. “These kinds of stories always have stupid princes falling in love.”

— Patrick Ness

411. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

413. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

416. “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

417. “Of course you are afraid, the monster said, pushing him slowly forward. And yet you will still do it.”

— Patrick Ness

418. “Drew missed Peter when he left, but it was like missing a hole.”

— Patrick Ness

419. “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

420. “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

421. “Rewards, my tender pigpiss.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

423. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

425. “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

426. “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

427. “It was like looking into the most despairing kind of madness, a madness that only felt hurt and pain, a madness that therefore could only act in hurt and pain.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

429. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

431. “HERE It’s- Can I say? It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.”

— Patrick Ness

432. “But you can’t make war personal,” I say, “or you’ll never make the right decisions.” “And if you didn’t make personal decisions, you wouldn’t be a person.”

— Patrick Ness

433. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

439. “For Rachel, it might have even been worse, because she had known the rules for a long time, had thrived on them, and had maybe now – if her equally unprecedented lunch outburst was anything to go by – found them empty.”

— Patrick Ness

440. “Albert got her to her feet. He gathered her few wayward things and delicately placed a hand on an unburnt spot to help her walk. – You’re going to have this two-tone problem for a while. Your backside is as white as virgin pearl. – A moan will have to suffice for a witty rejoinder. – I’ll pretend to be dazzled.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?”

— Patrick Ness

446. “A few of you are here by choice. Or at least by Switzerland.”

— Patrick Ness

447. “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

448. “But in my chest, there was still fear, and I didn’t know which kind it was. Fear with hope, or fear without it.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

450. “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