Quotes from Patrick Ness

How did there get to be 'sides'? You said the guards were on our 'side'. How did that happen? How did I end up on a 'side'? —I can't really explain. Things just happen. Over time, they accumulate. Bad attracts bad. Good attracts good. Eventually there are sides. The members flux, sometimes the boundaries are gray. Good and bad are sometimes not the point. It happens.

When you predict the future, when you do so strongly and you cling to it, how much of the future do you then cause to happen?

But what good is being smart when you speak words and no one hears the ones you mean?

I am very clever. I am sure and could figure it out and shazam! Tomasz saves the world again.

What do you do when your dreams are about to come true?" she asks. "No one ever tells you. They tell you to chase them, but what happens when you actually catch one?

Assuming a thing ain't knowing a thing.

There's 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.

She ain't my girl, she's her own girl, she don't belong to anyone.

War makes Monsters of Men

To see the ocean once is to learn how to miss it.

Not everyone has to be the guy who saves the world. Most people just have to live their lives the best they can, doing things that are great for them, having great friends, trying to make their lives better, loving people properly. All the while knowing that the world makes no sense but trying to find a way to be happy anyway. pg 216

Because nothing I did with Charlie ever once felt like that kiss with Jack.

I don't understand people who get power and then just give it up. Just say, 'Oh, what the fuck, I just don't want it anymore. I'm retiring.

It feels like a threat. It feels like the world changing and leaving you behind.

We can't kiss. Because that would make us gay.

People see stories everywhere," Regine says. "That's what my father used to say. We take random events and we string them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true." She glances back at Seth. "We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

And for a second, for a minute, forever, every nerve in my body is right there, right at the point where we're touching. And boom, I think. That's it.

Of course you are afraid, the monster said, pushing him slowly forward. And yet you will still do it.

So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach.

But you can't make war personal, or you'll never make the right decisions.' 'And if you didn't make personal decisions, you wouldn't be a person. All war is personal somehow, isn't it? For somebody? Except it's usually hate.

Who am I? I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable!

A story never ends at the end. There is always after.

A book, it's a world all on its own, too. A world made of words, where you live for a while. And then it's over and then he'll leave that world forever.

The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.