Patrick Ness Quotes

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He'd never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark - fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper - moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.

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.

"Sometimes the people don't know what's best for them, Ivan," she says. "Sometimes the people have to be convinced of things that are necessary. That's what leadership is. Not shouting your head off in support of their every whim."

What if it'd been Simone down there instead of Todd?” I say.

And Simone is all over his Noise, his deep feelings for her, feelings I don't think are returned. “You're right,” he says, “I don't know. I hope I'd make the right choice, but Viola it is a choice. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.

But I begin to wonder if doubt is better than the wrong knowledge.

Patience,” she says again. But she says it impatiently.

She turns to me sharply. “To live _is_ to fight,” she snaps. “To preserve life is to fight _everything_ that man stands for.” She takes an angry huff of air. “And now her, too, with all the bombs. I fight them every time I bandage the blackened eye of a woman, every time I remove shrapnel from a bomb victim.”

Her voice has raised but she lowers it again. “That's my war,” she says. “That's the war I'm fighting.

Sarah felt that any world that needed this many lessons must have something deeply wrong with it.

But I'm still thinking about being born on a spaceship, an honest to badness spaceship. Growing up while flying along the stars, able to go wherever you wanted, not stuck on some hateful planet which clearly don't want you. You could go anywhere. If one place didn't suit, you'd find another. Full freedom in all direkshuns. Could there possibly be anything cooler in the whole world than that?

"You got lost on your journey somewhere." "That's what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place."

Here is the hardest hit of all, O’Malley,” Harry said. “Here is the very worst thing I can do to you.”
He held out his hand, as if asking for a handshake.
He was asking for a handshake.

But the Spackle War was over a long time ago, wasn't it?”

“Thirteen years now.”

“Thirteen years where you could have righted a wrong.”

She finally looks at me. “Life is only that simple when you're young, my girl.

They’re weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more. More and more and more.

Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits. And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully. And it took the lives of his daughters.

I didn’t mean it,” Conor said. You did, the monster said, but you also did not. Conor sniffed and looked up to its face, which was as big as a wall in front of him. “How can both be true?” 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?