Patrick Ness Quotes

And I feel her against me -
And I think Viola -
I think VIOLA! -
I think VIOLA!!!!

Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

I do what I have to do, I say. I do what I have to do to save him. I do what I have to do to save Todd.

In a place of all this beauty and potential ... we just repeat the same mistakes. Do we hate paradise so much we have to be sure it becomes a trash heap?

Yes", Kumiko said, seriously. "Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can't take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn't put it in story - "
"And explain it -"
"No!" she said, suddenly sharp. "Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. The story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us." She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. "As it surely, surely would.

There wasn't anything more, and the one good thing that was mine wasn't mine after all.

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

I promised to keep on going but maybe keep on going means coming back first.

You are the one who called me, Conor O'Malley, it said, looking at him seriously. You are the one with the answers to these questions.

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

But, somehow, Wilf knows. Somehow, Wilf always knows.

I wonder if realizing you're not sure about stuff is what makes you a grown up?

A man without a filter, is chaos walking

But then there's her eyes and they look at you and don't brook no arguments, don't look like they ever doubt themselves, even when they should. Maybe they're the eyes of a giant after all.

And at first it's okay, you know, not perfect, but okay, and you get used to it. Then it gets a little worse, and you get used to that, too. Then one day, you wake up and you don't have the first freakin' clue how it got that bad.

The house was quiet when he got inside. Why wouldn't it be?
He was alone.

- 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.

The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.

- 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.

Spackle!" Manchee barks, tho he's too chicken to attack now that I've held back. "Spackle! Spackle! Spackle!"
"Shut up, Manchee," I say.
"Spackle!"
"I said shut up!" I shout, which stops him.
"Spackle?" Manchee says, unsure of things now.
I swallow, trying to get rid of the pressure in my throat, the unbelieveable sadness that comes and comes as I look at it looking back at me. Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world keeps changing, whether I want it to or not.
Cuz, it ain't a Spackle.
"It's a girl," I say.
It's a girl.

I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME.

I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.

Yer the only friend I got, pigpiss ... Ain't that the biggest tragedy you ever heard?

No one knew.
Then Lily's mum knew, of course.
Then Lily knew.
And then everyone knew. Everyone. Which changed the whole world in a single day.
And he was never going to forgive her for that.

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

People ask for what they need in different ways. Sometimes by not even asking for it at all.

He heard the creaking and cracking of wood again, groaning like a living thing, like the hungry stomach of the world growling for a meal. Then

Here's what I think," I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. "I think maybe everybody falls," I say. "I think maybe we all do. And I don't think that's the asking."
I pull on her arms gently to make sure she's listening.
"I think the asking is whether we get back up again.

And it's a sad song, Todd, but it's also a promise. I'll never deceive you and I'll never leave you and I promise you this so you can one day promise it to others and know that it's true.

He really is alone in whatever hell this is.

Completely and utterly alone.

'It isn't,' he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, 'the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

Why would any innocent woman object to being identified?

It's not how we fall. It's how we get back up again.

Hope is terrifying, Viola," he said. "No one wants to admit it, but it is.

Conor looked down at his hands, finally unclenching them. "Because what I thought was so wrong."
It was not wrong, the monster said, It was only a thought, one of a million. It was not an action.

If the infeckshun from the band takes Viola," I say, "you'll beg me to kill you after what I'll do to you."

"I believe you," says the Mayor.

The sound when we crash is so loud it's almost impossible.

War makes monsters of men,

It may cost you, my Queen. It may cost you dear."
"All the best journeys do, faun.

It's like he's my family, except better, because I've chosen him.

Like how stars might sound. Or moons But not mountains. Too floaty for mountains. It's a sound like one planet singing to another, high stretched and full of different voices starting at different notes and sloping down to other different notes but all weaving together in a rope of sound that's sad but not sad and slow but not slow and all singing one word.
One word.

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.

Why did the first settlers come?" Hildy asks me. "Why does anyone look for a new place to live?"
"Cuz the place yer a-leaving ain't worth staying for," Tam says. "Cuz the place yer a-leaving is so bad ye gotta leave.

I did not come to heal her, the monster said. I came to heal you.

Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.

I take my rucksack and go out the opening where the front door used to be. Manchee gets up from where he's curled and follows me. When I sit down, he recurls by my legs and fall asleep, farting happily and giving a doggy sigh. Simple to be a dog.

If you sing beautifully about nothing, no one will listen. If you sing badly about great stuff, no one will listen. Ideas are everywhere, but my theory is that a writer doesn't just think of an idea: they perform them.

Self-contained,' Gudmund had described him, but what that really meant was that it felt like he'd had a private burden to shoulder for as long as he could remember . . . Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight.
Because if there wasn't, what was the point?

Life does not have to go how you think it will," Tomasz says. "Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.

You let me go," I say. "I'll show you all about how I'm gonna transform you.

The Third Tale
There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him. And if no one sees you, are you really there at all? And then one day the invisible man decided, I will make them see me. He called for a monster.

Things change, but they stay the same.

Didn't you finish your chemistry in school?"
"You closed the school and burnt all the books."
"Ah, so I did.

I get tired of comedies where there are a bunch of funny guys and a beautiful woman who doesn't do anything funny. And I don't like books where there's a rough-and-tumble boy and a really clever, snotty girl. That's just not my experience with teenagers.

It is not her you need saving from, it said.

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.

Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now.
But he was further away than ever.

I was only following orders," the Mayor mocks. "The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time.

The Field isn't really much of a field, it's more like a property plot that someone never built on because they died or lost it in a divorce or something ...

Except I didn't say eff

There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.
And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?

I don't know what's ahead," I say. "I don't know nothing about nothing but whatever it is, it's gotta be better than what's behind. It's gotta be.

Everything's always ending. But everything's always beginning, too.

In her dreams, she flies.

Life equals running and when we stop running maybe that's how we'll know life is finally finished.

I rub the ears of my dog, my stupid goddam ruddy great dog that I never wanted but who hung around anyway and who followed me thru the swamp and who bit Aaron when he was trying to choke me and who found Viola when she was lost and who's licking my hand with his little pink tongue and whose eye is still mostly squinted shut from where Mr. Prentiss Jr. kicked him and whose tail is way way shorter from where Matthew Lyle cut it off when my dog - my dog - went after a man with a machete to save me and who's right there when I need pulling back from the darkness I fall into and who tells me who I am whenever I forget.

In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.

Everybody was hoping for something, talking about our new life to come and all that they hoped from it. Fresh air, whatever that's supposed to mean. Real gravity, instead of the fake kind that broke every now and then (even though no one over fifteen would admit that it was actually really fun when it did). All the wide open spaces we'd have, all the new people we'd meet when we woke them up, ignoring completely what happened to the original settlers, super- confident that we were so much better equipped that nothing bad could possibly happen to us.
All this hope, and here I was, right at the very edge of it, looking out into the darkness, the first to see it coming, the first to greet it when we found out what it really looked like.

A peace that blacked yer eye," I say. "A peace that split yer lip.

But war can't be personal," I say, almost asking it.
"If it's the person that'll end the war," Ben says. "Then it's not personal, it's universal.

Will the world end in darkness because it is foretold? Or because there will be those who believe it so strongly they will make it so? In the fear that I always try to hide in my heart, I wonder if there is even a difference.

A bully with charisma and top marks is still a bully.

Viola? he says.
And I turn to look at him -
And when I do, I can hear everything he's thinking.
Everything.
Clearer than before, clearer than seems possible -
And I'm not even sure I'm supposed to, but I look him in the eyes and I see it -
In the middle of everything he's feeling -
Even after we fought -
Even after I doubted him -
Even after I hurt him -
I see how much he loves me.

But this, all this, isn't the story I'm trying to tell. This is all past. This is the part of your life where it gets taken over by other people's stories and there's nothing you can do about it except hold on tight and hope you're still alive at the end to take up your own story again. So that's what we did. Me, Mel, and Meredith all moved on, and we're the stories we're living now.
Aren't we?

You must speak the truth and you must speak it now, Conor O'Malley. Say it. You must.
Conor shook his head again, his mouth clamped shut tight, but he could feel a burning in his chest, like a fire someone had lit there, a miniature sun, blazing away and burning him from the inside.
"It'll kill me if I do," he gasped.
It will kill you if you do not, the monster said. You must say it.

A memory is not the thing remembered.

Simone! Are you all right? Simone!"
And a voice, grunting with pain, says, "Todd?"
And-
And it ain't Simone's voice.
The smoke starts to clear.
And it ain't Simone.
"You saved me, Todd," says the Mayor, lying there, bad burns all over his face and hands, his clothes smoking like a brush fire. "You saved my life."
And his eyes are full of wonder of it-
That in the rush of the explozhun the person I chose to save-
The one I chose without even thinking-
(without there even being time for him to control me-)
(no time for him to make me do it-)
Was the Mayor.

He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he'd been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.

Anything that anybody wants to give me is great! I've had folk songs, heavy metal songs, jewellery ... I would never call anything any fan gives me weird, as it's how people express what they like about the books, what it means to them, and that's a wonderful thing.

For a man would know the necessary choices that have to be made when one is facing one's oblivion.

And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her.

The boy who refused to lose his soul.

Learn to take criticism. Your first draft won't be perfect, and it's damaging to the book to think that it is. Every great book you've ever read has been rewritten a dozen times. This is the hardest think to learn (trust me), but very, very important.

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.

If the world wants you, it's gonna keep on coming till it gets you. And who am I that can fix it? Who am I that can change this if the world wants it so badly? Who am I to stop the end of the world if it keeps on coming?

I can read it.
I can read her.
Cuz she's thinking about how her own parents also came here with hope like my ma. She's wondering if the hope at the end of our hope is just as false as the one that was at the end of my ma's. And she;s taking the words of my ma and putting them into the mouths of her own ma and pa and hearing them say that they love her and they miss her and they wish her the world. And she's taking the song of my pa and she's weaving it into everything else till it becomes a sad thing all her own.
And it hurts her, but it's an okay hurt, but it hurts still, but it's good, but it hurts.
She hurts.
I know all this.
I know it's true.
Cuz I can read her.
I can read her Noise even tho she ain't got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade.

Belief is half of all healing. Belief in the cure, belief in the future that awaits.

Cept for Ben, who I can't describe much further without seeming soft and stupid and like a boy, so I won't, just to say that I never knew my pa, but if you woke up one day and had a choice of picking one from a selecshun, if someone said, here, then, boy, pick who you want, then Ben wouldn't be the worst choice you could make that morning.

I'll find you
Keep calling for me, Viola
Cuz here I come.

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

I think I can forgive a kind lie.

Guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

It's really important to me not to be a snob about age division or about genre or whatever. The story needs to be what the story needs to be.

For who needs devils when you have men?

People say they want freedom, but what they really want is freedom from worry. If I take care of their problems, they don't mind being told what to do.

A knife is only as good as the one who wields it.

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.

Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.

His grandma wouldn't be here when his father arrived. Which suited everyone.

People break, I guess. Everyone.