Patrick Ness Quotes

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?

Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.

The sound when we crash is so loud it's almost impossible.

Time goes on, even when yer not looking.

"But how do you fight it?" Conor asked, his voice rough. "How do you fight all the different stuff inside?"

By speaking the truth, the monster said. As you spoke it just now.

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

"As to how you'll help me," he says. "Well, we have met the Answer, have we not?" He turns back to look at us, his eyes glinting. "It's time for them to meet the Ask."

You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.

I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.

Todd!” she says again but this time in a way that asks me to look at her and I do and she stops Angharrad at the edge of the square and she’s looking at me, looking right into my eyes–

And I read her–

And I know exactly what she’s thinking–

And my Noise and my heart and my head fill up fit to burst, fill up like I’m gonna explode–

Cuz she’s saying–

She’s saying with her eyes and her face and her whole self–

“I know,” I say back to her, my voice husky. “Me, too.”

And then I turn to the Mayor and I’m filled with her, with her love for me and my love for her–

And it makes me big as an effing mountain–

And I take it and I slam all of it into the Mayor–

"I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it."

[Patrick Ness slams library cuts (The Guardian, 23 June 2011)]

I'm sorry for telling about your mom, read the first line.
I miss being your friend, read the second.
Are you okay? read the third.
I see you, read the fourth, with the I underlined about a hundred times.

His last word had been my name. The last word he heard was me speaking his own. Did this mean anything? And if it only meant something for the two of us, did that reduce it?

I knew it,” Conor grumbled. “These kinds of stories always have stupid princes falling in love.” He started walking back to the house. “I thought this was going to be good.”With one swift movement, the monster grabbed Conor’s ankles in a long, strong hand and flipped him upside down, holding him in mid-air so his T-shirt rucked up and his heartbeat thudded in his head.As I was saying, said the monster.

War makes monsters out of men.