Patrick Ness Quotes

But what is a dream, Conor O'Malley? Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?

HELP!”I race to the square, crossing it, looking all around, listenin

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.

People see stories everywhere," Regine says. "That's what my father used to say. We take random events and we string them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true." She glances back at Seth. "We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

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

And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.

The boy who refused to lose his soul.

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.

A good idea always attracts other good ideas.

We're each other's questions, aren't we? The question that never gets an answer.

As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world.The rest of the world that wasn't waiting.

Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

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

If you're too specific, people will purposely mishear you so they can be outraged about whatever thing that usually outrages them.

His absence is so big it's like he's there.

So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"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."Always," I say to him. "Every time.

she is born in the breath of a cloud

And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside of me.

You won't," says the Mayor, smiling again. "Everyone knows you aren't a killer, Todd."He pushes Viola forward again -She calls out from the pain of it -Viola, I t

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.

HereIt'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.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

That's the thing I'm learning about being thrown out on yer own. Nobody does nothing for you. If you don't change it, it don't get changed.

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.

If war is hard - and it is, forever and always - then after war is just as hard, in a different way.

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.

War is a monster. War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows. And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

It's love. But it's a different kind,""Doesn't make it any less love, though.

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

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

I wish I had a hundred years," she said, very quietly. "A hundred years I could give to you.

You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and

A peace that blacked yer eye,' I say. 'A peace that split yer lip.' He looks at me for another second and then gives a sad snort. “The words of a sage,” he says, “in the voice of a hick.

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.

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

I don't believe in guardian angels," Regine says seriously. "Just people who are there for you and people who aren't.

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.

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, Manchee!”?”“Manchee!” I scream.Aaron brings his free hand towards my dog.“MANCHEE!”?”And Aaron wrenches his arms and there’s a CRACK and a scream and a cut-off yelp that tears my heart in two forever and forever.And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside of me.

Manchee comes outta the bushes and sits down next to me cuz I’ve stopped right there in the middle of a trail. He looks around to see what I might be seeing and then he says, ”Good poo, Todd.” ”I’m sure it was, Manch

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.

And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies.My Todd dies.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

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.

I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

Maybe hearts don't ever stop breaking once broken.

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

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

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

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.

HEREIt’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.

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

His noise is getting quieter, but I can still see it there still-See how he feels the skin of my hand against his, see how he wants to take it and press it against his mouth, how he wants to breathe in the smell of me and how beautiful I look to him, how strong after all that illness, and how he wants to just lightly touch my neck, just there, and how he wants to take me in his arms and-"Oh, God," he says, looking away suddenly. "Viola, I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"But I just put my hand to the back of his neck-And he says, "Viola-?"And I pull myself towards him-And I kiss him.And it feels like, finally.

Death is not the end.

A man without a filter, is chaos walking

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.

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.

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,"

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.

You won't," says the Mayor, smiling again. "Everyone knows you aren't a killer, Todd."He pushes Viola forward again -She calls out from the pain of it -Viola, I think - -I grit my teeth and raise the rifle -I cock it -And I say what's true -"I would kill to save her," I say.