Quotes from Patrick Ness

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.

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.

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

People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over.

You felt the excitement when we chased them up the hill," the Mayor's saying. "I saw it. It blazed through your Noise like a fire. Every man in the army felt the same thing. You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

This is all sounding pretty fairy tale-ish," Conor said, suspiciously. You would not say that if you heard the screams of a man killed by a spear, said the monster. Or his cries of terror as he was torn to pieces by wolves. Now be quiet.

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.

You told me, just now, just today, that you'd rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don't think your suffering is fake. I don't think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don't think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it's fake?

I thought I had more. I thought Gudmund was my more. It didn't matter how crap everything else was. The stuff with Owen, The stuff with my parents, even later with the stuff at school. I could live with all of that, because I had him. He was mine and no one else's. We lived in this private world, that no one else knew about and no one else ever lived in.

They want us a bit dumb and a bit afraid. Which for the most part, I think we are.

You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions.

People say they want freedom, but what they really want is freedom from worry.

Not everything is black and white. In fact, almost nothing is.

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

I just want the world to make sense now and then, is that so wrong?

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.

You're helpless to the behaviour but the effort involved is just unbelievable.

go in swinging

No one can provide the heart it's own peace; you have to find it yourself.

He could probably even guess what Harry would say next in that calm, amused voice of his that seemed to mimic every adult you never wanted to meet.

The forest was white in the snowfall, but still seemed to hold more secrets than she had ever thought possible.

You imagine the devil, you make the devil.

Upset isn't the same as the world falling apart.

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.