Top 15 Patrick Ness Quotes

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

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.

We are the choices we make.

Don't think you haven't lived long enough to have a story to tell.

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

It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.
It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.
It's not a weakness.
It's your best strength.

Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.

"Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?

"I don't know," Connor shrugged, exhausted. "Your stories never made any sense to me."

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both."

Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

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

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

"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.

"There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.

And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?"