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

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

— Patrick Ness

403. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

406. “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

407. “A sudden, hard wind swirled up around them, and the monster spread its arms out wide, so wide they seemed to reach to opposite horizons, so wide they seemed big enough to encompass the world.”

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

— Patrick Ness

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

416. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

423. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

427. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

433. “Memory is stupid, ain’t it?”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

435. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

437. “A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.”

— Patrick Ness

438. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

440. “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

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

— Patrick Ness

442. “He is worse than the others, I show. He is worst of all of them. Because– Because he knew he was doing wrong. He felt the pain of his actions– But he did not amend them, shows the Sky. The rest are worth as much as their pack animals, I show, but worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.”

— Patrick Ness

443. “Remember,” he says. “Hope.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

445. “But how are you this fine evening? – My arches are falling. – Isn’t that the first line of a sonnet?”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness

447. “The world’s a dangerous place when you don’t know enough.”

— Patrick Ness

448. “I look at the knife again, sitting there on the moss like a thing without properties, a thing made of metal as separate from a boy as can be, a thing which casts all blame from itself to the boy who uses it.”

— Patrick Ness

449. “We would have wanted you to like us. We realise now that we probably would have failed.”

— Patrick Ness

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

— Patrick Ness