Patrick Ness Quotes

Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.

We ain’t spies,” I say in a hurry.
“The army your girl’s been talking about has been spotted marching down the river road,” Doctor Snow says. “One of our scouts just reported them as less than an hour away.”
“Oh, no,” I hear Viola whisper.
“She ain’t my girl,” I say, low.
“What?” Doctor Snow says.
“What?” Viola says.
“She’s her own girl,” I say. “She don’t belong to anyone.”
And does Viola ever look at me.

"Didn't you finish your chemistry in school?"
"You closed the school and burnt all the books."
"Ah, so I did."

"This is who you are, do you see?" Tomasz continues.

A knife is only as good as the one who wields it.

She tried to kill you, Viola. She tried to blow you up... You don't owe her nothing,' he says.
But I feel his arms on me and I'm realizing things don't seem so impossible anymore. I feel Todd touching me and there's anger rising in my gut but it's not at him and I grunt and I pull myself up again, leaning on him to keep me there as I stand. 'I do owe her,' I say. 'I owe her the look on her face when she sees me alive.

People ask for what they need in different ways. Sometimes by not even asking for it at all.

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 hard.

"I'll do it, Todd," I whisper. "I'll come with you."
And he doesn't say anything, just squeezes my hand harder and brings it up to his face like he wants to breathe me in.

He was still alive.
Which was the worst thing that could have happened.

It felt like waiting for something to happen. Which has to be the worst 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.

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.

And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more.

You imagine the devil, you make the devil.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.