Top 450 Patrick Ness Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

403. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Rewards, my tender pigpiss.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

417. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

424. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

428. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

435. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

437. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

440. “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

441. “Except cleaner. And bossier.”

— Patrick Ness

442. “The devil always outnumbers his foes,” he said. “Even if he is alone.”

— Patrick Ness

443. “Because nothing I did with Charlie ever once felt like that kiss with Jack.”

— Patrick Ness

444. “Crazy people don’t need an explanayshun for nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

445. “But then there’s her eyes and they look at you and don’t brook no arguments, don’t look like they ever doubt themselves, even when they should. Maybe they’re the eyes of a giant after all.”

— Patrick Ness

446. “She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.”

— Patrick Ness

447. “That is what death is, a state of constant hunger, for the things you’ve left behind, for your memories, for life.”

— Patrick Ness

448. “His face is trying to look calm but everyone can hear how badly he don’t wanna die, how childlike his wishes are sounding, how loud his newly uncured Noise is spilling out all over the place.”

— Patrick Ness

449. “He’s awake,” she said, tears of joy still streaming. “Lee, Wilf. He’s awake.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness