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

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

— Patrick Ness

403. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

407. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

412. “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

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. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

416. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

417. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

419. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

421. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Rewards, my tender pigpiss.”

— Patrick Ness

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

431. “I’m too busy repeatedly counting ketchup bottles and wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead, wishing I was dead.”

— Patrick Ness

432. “Death is suddenly objectionable to you when the dead has a name you know?”

— Patrick Ness

433. “But what good is being smart when you speak words and no one hears the ones you mean?”

— Patrick Ness

434. “We negotiated peace with them the first time, my girl, because we were in a position of strength. That’s how wars work, that’s how truces work. We show them we’ve got more power than they imagine and they’re more willing to make peace.”

— Patrick Ness

435. “I can’t tell you what’s real for you. But in return, you can’t say what’s real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.”

— Patrick Ness

436. “The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all? Swamp.”

— Patrick Ness

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “Her settlement, for example, were peaceable and as the calls to war had remained voluntary, they had held back, hoping it would pass. Nevertheless, they had cursed her for wanting to leave with him, telling her of the atrocities committed by his people out in the west. They had turned their backs on her in disgust when she told them he was a person, not a whole people.”

— Patrick Ness

441. “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

442. “Just because my thoughts and feelings don’t spill out into the world in a shout that never stops doesn’t mean I don’t have them.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

444. “Hope is terrifying, Viola,” he said. “No one wants to admit it, but it is.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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