Patrick Ness Quotes

But when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too.

~ Patrick Ness

It's like he's my family, except better, because I've chosen him.

~ Patrick Ness

Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours.

~ Patrick Ness

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you.

~ Patrick Ness

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.

~ Patrick Ness

And what exactly do you think this proves? he spits. You've got power, but you don't know what to do wit

~ Patrick Ness

I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, too, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare into the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

~ Patrick Ness

Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?

~ Patrick Ness

Belief is half of healing.

~ Patrick Ness

He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.

~ Patrick Ness

There's her silence, loud as a roar, pulling at me like the greatest sadness ever, like I want to take it and press myself into it and just disappear forever down into nothing.What a relief that would feel like right now. What a blessed relief.

~ Patrick Ness

We stay watching the fire, which probably is just a fire, but we watch it together. Me and my friends. And there'll be a tomorrow, of course there will, when it all begins again, but right now is almost a kind of loop for me, something to feel on the inside of, but this time it's good. It's a loop with my friends that would even be a pretty damn good forever.

~ Patrick Ness

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?

~ Patrick Ness

He really is alone in whatever hell this is.Completely and utterly alone.'It isn't,' he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, 'the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

~ Patrick Ness

Just remember, please, most of that stuff is in the past. It isn't the story I want to tell. At all.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

But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.Aren't we?

~ Patrick Ness

I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.' He shakes his head. 'And there was more. I just couldn't see it.

~ Patrick Ness

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

~ Patrick Ness

And I put my hand on her arm to stop her rowing.Aaron’s Noise roars up in red and black.The current takes us on.“I’m sorry!” I cry as the river takes us away, my words ragged things torn from me, my chest pulled so tight I can’t barely breathe. “I’m sorry, Manch

~ Patrick Ness

A man without a filter, is chaos walking

~ Patrick Ness

Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.

~ Patrick Ness

Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that's sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word. One word.

~ Patrick Ness

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

Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?

~ Patrick Ness

Stories don't always have happy endings.This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.

~ Patrick Ness

Who am I? I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable!

~ Patrick Ness

Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.

~ Patrick Ness

It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worth part of being young. So many of your decisions aren't yours, they're made by other people. Sometimes they're made badly by other people. Sometimes they're made by other people who have no idea what the consequences of those decisions might be. The bastards.

~ Patrick Ness

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

~ Patrick Ness

Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.

~ Patrick Ness

But I don't care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you don't think they're real or important or you think that we'll all grow out of this nonsense, well, that's not really my business. 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

And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say.

~ Patrick Ness

You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good

~ Patrick Ness

It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.

~ Patrick Ness

Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret.

~ Patrick Ness

And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.

~ Patrick Ness

What a sad thing men are. Can't do nothing good without being so weak we have to mess it up. Can't build something up without tearing it down.

~ Patrick Ness

The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.

~ Patrick Ness

What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?

~ Patrick Ness

It'll make you look rugged,' Mel says.'Because I woke up this morning,' I say, 'and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.

~ Patrick Ness