Quotes from Patrick Ness

I think maybe everyone falls... I think the asking is whether we get back up again.

Life ain't fair. It ain't. Not never. It's pointless and stupid and there's only suffering and pain and people who want to hurt you. You can't love nothing or no one cuz it'll all be taken away or ruined and you'll be left alone and constantly having to fight, constantly having to run just to stay alive.

But how do you fight it?" Conor asked, his voice rough. "How do you fight all the different stuff inside?" By speaking the truth, the monster said. As you spoke it just now.

Why can't we learn to live with how we are? And whatever anybody chooses is okay by the rest of us?

I remember the ache I used to feel when she got too close, how it felt like grief, how it felt like a loss, like I was falling, falling into nothing, how it clenched me up and made me want to weep, made me actually weep.

I don't know how much time passes with us just lying there, just feeling that the other is really there, really true, really alive, feeling the safety of him, his weight against mine, the roughness of his fingers touching my face, his warmth and his smell and the dustiness of his clothes, and we barely speak...

He was the thing the world had suffered from most in her four billion years of existence: a stupid man with power.

But what is a dream...?...Who is to say that it is not everything else that is the dream?

I love that you're worried,' she says, 'but you're worried about all the wrong things.

What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they're going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.

He's uncertain what's going to happen next. But he is certain that that's actually the point. If this is all a story, then that's what the story means. If it isn't a story, then the exact same is true. But as his friends begin the final steps, pressing buttons, answering questions on a screen, he thinks that what is forever certain is that there's always more. Always.

They open up the world. Because knowledge is useless if you don't know how to find it, if you don't even know where to begin to look. - on librarians

And right on cue, Viola yells, " TODD! " And I hit him with everything I got - Every bit of her behind me - Every piece of anger and frustrayshun and nothingness - Every moment I didn't see her - Every moment I worried - Everything - Every little tiny thing I know about her - I send it right into the center of him - VIOLA

It's a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that's what gets lost in all that Noise.

Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it's pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.

I don't do pity kisses," she says. "I don't do pity anything. Pity is patronizing. Pity is an assumption of superiority." "That sounds like your dad." "It is my dad, but he's right. He says kindness is better. Kindness is the most important thing of all. Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.

Belief is half of healing.

But it's obvious since the beginning that wars make no sense. You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them.

Oh, it was real, all right," she says. "We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real.

There's always beauty," Seth murmurs. "If you know where to look.

Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky's too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?' 'And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there's so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don't get any work done because we're all looking at it too much?

TODD!" I yell again and I reach him and his Noise opens even farther and wraps around me like a blanket and I'm grabbing him to me, grabbing him to me like I'll never let him go and he calls out in pain but his other arm is grabbing me back - "I thought you were dead," he's saying, his breath on my neck. "I thought you were dead." "Todd," I say and I'm crying and the only thing I can say is his name. "Todd.

Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he'd grow out of it? That didn't make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening.