Patrick Ness Quotes

Finally, we come to the real thing, the thing that makes men men, the thing were born for, Todd. War.

This is how we are protecting you, by getting you out.

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.

It just felt like she'd been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she'd spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace became her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all she knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn't the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing.

Know yourself and go in swinging.

Marty: Dad's right about you. You got lost on your journey somewhere.
Adam: That's what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place.

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?

To see the ocean once is to learn how to miss it. ~Mistress Coyle

Dogs don't got the problems of people.
Dogs can be happy any old time.

Even though it walked and talked, even though it was bigger than his house and could swallow him in one bite, the monster was still, at the end of the day, just a yew tree.

War makes monsters of men, you once said to me Todd. Well, so does too much knowledge. Too much knowledge of your fellow man, too much knowledge of his weakness, his pathetic greed and vanity, and how laughably easy it is to control him.

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!”
“Todd?” he barks, confused and scared and watching me leave him behind. “Todd?”
“Manchee!” I scream.
Aaron brings his free hand towards my dog.
“MANCHEE!”
“Todd?”
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.

Never invisible again, the monster said, finally letting up, its huge branch-like fists curled tight as a clap of thunder.
It turned to Conor.
But there are harder things than being invisible, it said.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it.

This was a kingdom.
(“What?” Conor said, looking around his backyard. “Here?”)
(The monster cocked its head at him curiously. You have not heard of it?)
(“Not a kingdom around here, no,” Conor said. “We don’t even have a McDonald’s.”)