Patrick Ness Quotes

Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.
Patrick Ness
Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.
Patrick Ness
There's so much proscription in the lives of young people, and it's so vital to have a place that says, look, here are the doors onto the world and amazingly, you're free to choose any one you like. - Patrick Ness on Libraries
Patrick Ness
Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.
Patrick Ness
Life equals running and when we stop running maybe that's how we'll know life is finally finished.
Patrick Ness
The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.
Patrick Ness
The indie kids, huh? You've got them at your school, too. That group with the cool-geek haircuts and the charity shop clothes and names from the fifties. Nice enough, never mean, but always the ones who end up being the Chosen One when the vampires come calling or when the alien queen needs the Source of All Light or something. They're too cool to ever, ever do anything like go to prom or listen to music other than jazz while reading poetry. They've always got some story going on that they're heroes of. The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.
Patrick Ness
Spackle!” Manchee barks, tho he’s too chicken to attack now that I’ve held back. “Spackle! Spackle! Spackle!”“Shut up, Manchee,” I say.“Spack
Patrick Ness
TODD!" I shout again -And he looks at me -And I hear my name in his Noise -And I know it -I know it in my heart -Right now -Todd Hewitt -There's nothing we can't do toge
Patrick Ness
If you're too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them.
Patrick Ness
We're each other's questions, aren't we? The question that never gets an answer.
Patrick Ness
As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.The rest of the world that wasn't waiting.
Patrick Ness
I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.
Patrick Ness
If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.
Patrick Ness
Ah, well, then you've never stood on a beach as the waves came crashing in, the water stretching out from you until it's beyond sight, moving and blue and alive and so much bigger than even the black beyond seems because the ocean hides what it contains.
Patrick Ness
If you ever doubt anything here, if you ever not know what to think or who to trust, you trust Todd, okay? You remember that.
Patrick Ness
Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we’d have, all the new people we’d meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super- confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.All this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it really looked like.
Patrick Ness
THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.
Patrick Ness
We would do what we must. The world is big. Surely there is a space in it for one like you and one like me.
Patrick Ness
He's seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all of those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.So much more that he'll never see. So much more that he'll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach.
Patrick Ness
There's a bunch od huge churchs clustered together, trying to blend in with all the family-themed restaurants, because salvation is as easy as chicken wings, I guess.
Patrick Ness
HELP!”I race to the square, crossing it, looking all around, listenin
Patrick Ness
A sematary," I say. "A what?" Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and it's short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle."It's a place for burying dead folk,"
Patrick Ness
I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.
Patrick Ness
In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.
Patrick Ness
And I know I’ve lost.Everything is lost.Everything is over.“As the newly appointed President of this fair planet of ours,” the Mayor says, holding out his hands as if to show me the world for the first time,” let me be the very first to welcome you to its new capital city.”“Todd?” Viola whispers, her eyes closed.I hold her tightly to me.“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”We’ve run right into a trap.We’ve run right off the end of the world.“Welcome,” says the Mayor,” to the New Prentisstown.
Patrick Ness
Feelings don't try to kill you,even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You're responsible for its consequences, you're responsible for treating it
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
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
The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.
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
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
Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret.
Patrick Ness
It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.
Patrick Ness
You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good
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
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
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
To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.
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
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
Yes", Kumiko said, seriously. "Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can't take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn't put it in story - ""And explain it -""No!" she said, suddenly sharp. "Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. The story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us." She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. "As it surely, surely would.
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
Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?
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
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
Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.
Patrick Ness
A man without a filter, is chaos walking
Patrick Ness
I wish I had a hundred years," she said, very quietly. "A hundred years I could give to you.
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
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
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
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
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
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
I don't believe in guardian angels," Regine says seriously. "Just people who are there for you and people who aren't.
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
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
Mikey," she says, but not like she's about to say anything more, just like she's identifying me, making a place for me here that's mine to exist in. I want her so much, my heart feels heavy, like I'm grieving. Is this what they meant about that stomach feeling? They didn't say it felt this sad.
Patrick Ness