Quotes from Patrick Ness

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

It's fun being paid to read stuff and air your opinion about it - pretty much a dream job for a writer.

Limitations can be hugely creative and hugely inspiring - so long as they are the ones you choose for yourself. I will not allow anyone to take anything off my palette, but if I do, then within that, I can be creative.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

A man is capable of thought. A crowd is not.

Midnight passes and I'm twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

Men lie, and they lie to theirselves worst of all.

And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most

Men do monstrous things but if you call a man a monster you have absolved yourself of blame. You don't have to think that you might ever do these things. I don't think that's true

And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

What a sad thing men are. Can't do nothing good without being so weak we have to mess it up. Can't build something up without tearing it down.

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men.

To live is to fight, to preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.

...the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man's mind ain't knowing the man.

Conor held tightly onto his mother. And by doing so, he could finally let her go.

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.

If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.

And then a low and powerful sound rumbles thru the sky, like some giant, deep horn. A sound God would make when he wanted yer attenshun.

So who are you then, Todd Hewitt?" he says. "What makes you so special?" Now that, I think, is a very good asking.

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

There's hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall." ~pg 426

No,' Ben says, 'but I believe it. I believe it for you. And that's why it's hope.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.