Quotes by Patrick Ness

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

Choices may be unbelievably hard but theyre never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and thats not how a person with integrity acts.

But I dont care what you think, not about these things anyway. If you dont think theyre real or important or you think that well all grow out of this nonsense, well, thats not really my business. I cant tell you whats real for you. But in return, you cant say whats real for me either. I get to choose. Not you.

And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say.

You’re a good boy. I wish you didn’t have to be quite so good

Its not how we fall. Its how we get back up again.

Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. Its the worst kind of regret.

And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.

What a sad thing men are. Cant do nothing good without being so weak we have to mess it up. Cant build something up without tearing it down.

The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster.

What happens to you when you get older? Do you just forget everything from before you turned eighteen? Do you make yourself forget?

Itll make you look rugged, Mel says.Because I woke up this morning, I say, and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.

Feelings dont try to kill you,even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. Youre responsible for its consequences, youre responsible for treating it

And I know I’ve lost.Everything is lost.Everything is over.“As the newly appointed President of this fair planet of ours,” the Mayor says, holding out his hands as if to show me the world for the first time,” let me be the very first to welcome you to its new capital city.”“Todd?” Viola whispers, her eyes closed.I hold her tightly to me.“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”We’ve run right into a trap.We’ve run right off the end of the world.“Welcome,” says the Mayor,” to the New Prentisstown.

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.

I dont want to die. I want to live. I want to live long enough so I can really live.

A sematary, I say. A what? Viola says, looking round at all the square stones marking out their graves. Must be a hundred, maybe two, in orderly rows and well-kept grass. Settler life is hard and its short and lotsa New World people have lost the battle.Its a place for burying dead folk,

HELP!”I race to the square, crossing it, looking all around, listenin

Theres a bunch od huge churchs clustered together, trying to blend in with all the family-themed restaurants, because salvation is as easy as chicken wings, I guess.

Hes 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 hell never see. So much more that hell never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that its forever beyond his reach.