Ness Quotes

As Confucius once said, 'He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'"
Gabby pondered the words, the furrowed her brow. "did Confucius really say that?"
Sunglasses in place, Stephanie managed the tiniest of shrugs. "No, but who cared? The point is, they handled, and most likely they found some sort of self-satisfaction in their industrious-ness. Who am I to deprive them of that? ~ Nicholas Sparks

Being the best gives you nowhere to go but down. It also makes you a target, for if someone else wants to be the best, they have to beat you, don't they? ~ Patrick Ness

It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.
It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.
It's not a weakness.
It's your best strength. ~ Patrick Ness

Or perhaps we should just ask Todd."
I pound the glass right at his face. He doesn't even flinch.
And then she says, "Todd would never tell you. Never."
And the Mayor just looks at me.
And he smiles

My stomach sinks, my heart drops, my head feels so light I feel like I'm going to drop right to the ground.
Oh, Viola-
Viola, please-
Forgive me.
"Captain Hammar," the Mayor says and Viola's plunged into the water again, unable to not scream out in fright as down she goes.
"NO!" I shout, pressing myself against the mirror.
But the Mayor ain't even looking at her.
He's looking right at me, as if he could see me even if I was behind a brick wall.
"STOP IT!" I shout as she's thrashing again-
And more-
And more-
"VIOLA!"
And I'm pounding even tho my hands are breaking-
And Mr. Hammar is grinning and holding her there-
"VIOLA!"
And her wrist are starting to bleed from where she's pulling-
"I'LL KILL YOU!"-
I'm shouting into the Mayor's face-
With all my Noise-
"I'LL KILL YOU!"-
And still holding her there-
"VIOLA! VIOLA!"-
But it's Davy-
Of all people-
It's Davy who stops it. ~ Patrick Ness

Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too. ~ Patrick Ness

When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best. ~ Patrick Ness

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. ~ Patrick Ness

The past always fails those who grasp at it. ~ Patrick Ness

Things change, but they stay the same. ~ Patrick Ness

You notice that he does not ask, Where am I?" says the Mayor's voice, moving out there, somewhere. "His first words are, Where is she? And his Noise says the same. Interesting. ~ Patrick Ness

Do you believe there's hope at the end?"
"No, no, I dont, but im still going, you coming with me? ~ Patrick Ness

When someone beats a rug with a stick, he is not beating the rug – his aim is to get rid of the dust. Your inward is full of dust from the veil of 'I'-ness, and that dust will not leave all at once. With every cruelty and every blow, it departs little by little from the heart's face, sometimes in sleep and sometimes in wakefulness. ~ Rumi

You went up a girl and came down a woman. ~ Patrick Ness

Submit! Juliet's Joy screeches underneath him at no one in particular.
"I've got to get a new horse," the Mayor mutters. ~ Patrick Ness

I like writing for teenagers because they're not snobs. ~ Patrick Ness

And now it's time to hand the baton to you. Stories don't end with writer, however many started the race. So go. Run with it. Make trouble. ~ Patrick Ness

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. ~ Patrick Ness

He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness. ~ Brad Warner

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don't remember nothing, don't remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone's ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it's true, but who knows? ~ Patrick Ness

The Mayor's wrong -
He's wrong forever and ever -
It's not that you should never love something so much it can control you.
It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. ~ Patrick Ness

You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there's always more than this. There's always something you don't know. ~ Patrick Ness

Maybe hearts don't ever stop breaking once broken. ~ Patrick Ness

You know that your truth, the one that you hide ... is the thing you are most afraid of. ~ Patrick Ness

The yew tree is the most important of all the healing trees, it said. It lives for thousands of years. Its berries, its bark, its leaves, its sap, its pulp, its wood, they all thrum and burn and twist with life. It can cure almost any ailment man suffers from, mixed and treated by the right apothecary. ~ Patrick Ness

The attack on untouchability is an attack on this high-and low-ness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

As those of you with children know, rational parenting is like the Loch Ness Monster. We all hope it's out there somewhere, but we don't know anyone who has actually discovered it (and if we do come across someone who claims to have found it, deep down we think that person is a little off. ~ Holly Sprink

He is sorry-
For everything-
For Prentisstown-
For Viola-
For Ben-
For every failure and every wrong-
For letting his pa down-
And he's looking up at me-
And he's begging me-
He's begging me-
Like I'm the only one who can forgive him-
Like it's only me who's got the power-
Todd?-
Please-
And all I can say is "Davy-"
And the fright and the terror in his Noise is too much-
It's too much-
And then it stops.
Davy slumps, eyes still open, eyes still staring back at me, eyes still asking (I swear) for me to forgive him.
And he lies there, still.
Davy Prentiss is dead. ~ Patrick Ness

He opens his voice, showing me other sunrises he has seen, where the fields turn golden and the Source and his one in particular stood up from their early morning labours to watch it rise, a memory as simple as that, yet covered in joy and loss and love and grief-
And hope. ~ Patrick Ness

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 ... ~ Patrick Ness

Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring. When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it. ~ Barry Long

He survives, does our Todd. ~ Patrick Ness

I'm just a girl."
"It is tragic how well you have been taught to say that with sadness rather than triumph. ~ Patrick Ness

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. ~ Ezra Pound

...these thoughts start coming. They come all uninvited, don't they? ~ Patrick Ness

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. ~ Patrick Ness

I live in England, so I take a lot of trains, and you can't really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there's already information everywhere. ~ Patrick Ness

The world is cynical and sarcastic, but that doesn't mean that that's always the truth. ~ Patrick Ness

But you can't make war personal," I say, "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."
"Lee - "
"I'm just saying how lucky he is to have someone love him so much they'd take on the whole world." His Noise is uncomfortable, wondering what I'm looking like, how I'm responding. "That's all I'm saying."
"He'd do it for me," I say quietly.
I'd do it for you too, Lee's Noise says.
And I know he would.
But those people who die because we do it, don't they have people who'd kill for them?
So who's right? ~ Patrick Ness

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 ~ Patrick Ness

There came a point when Harry stopped trying to fight back, when the blows from the monster were too strong, too many, too fast, when he began begging the monster to stop. ~ Patrick Ness

I went to yoga for six months straight, but that was about five years ago! I've been trying to get back. I probably could've seen the President five times, it'd be easier than it has been to get back to yoga! ~ Mike Ness

A bully with charisma and top marks is still a bully. ~ Patrick Ness

As much as I would miss my wife if she were to die, I would miss what we are together even more. Our "we-ness," our "us-ness." ~ Carl Whitaker

Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece. ~ Ian Frazier

You be as angry as you need to be," she said. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard. ~ Patrick Ness

If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works. ~ Henry Miller

I have had as many names as there are years to time itself! roared the monster. I am Herne the Hunter! I am Cernunnos! I am the eternal Green Man! ~ Patrick Ness

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. ~ Ernesto Spinelli

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. ~ Patrick Ness

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? ~ Patrick Ness

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

Georgia had felt the colours and the rain, but she would not miss here. And there was something lost. The now-ness of things. It was not pretty. ~ Diana Evans

There's something about playing every night, it becomes easy and it becomes fun. I love being up there and playing for different crowds every night. ~ Mike Ness

He was waiting there for her beside the pool - a great black horse with shoulders like polished ebony and the water still streaming from his mane and tail. Morag stood and looked at him for a long moment. The great horse looked at her and never moved.
"Will you trust me?" he had asked her the evening before, and she had trusted him then. She trusted him now, and so she walked towards him. She grasped his mane, and still the black horse never moved. She stood on a stone beside him, swung herself onto his back, and the black horse moved. ~ Mollie Hunter

He's a woman.
He's a grown woman
He's a old woman. ~ Patrick Ness

More real, more there, like it's just the most incredible thing in the world that we're both still alive and I feel my chest get all funny and tight and I think, Here she is, right here, my Viola, she came for me, she's here-
And I find myself thinking how I want to take her hand again and never let it go, to feel the skin of it, the warmth of it, hold it tight against my own hand ... ~ Patrick Ness

I'm utterly convinced of the One-ness of Love and us as its perfect reflection. I am absolutely convinced that the world around us is a world of appearances and anyone who wants to can practice it. Change your thought and your environment will change. It's not instantaneous and sometimes we have to work very hard to make what we want happen. Working hard and holding that thought, it will change. ~ Richard Bach

What else do men think about except sex and enemies? ~ Patrick Ness

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. ~ Patrick Ness

The true instrument is that, with the help of which, the egoism and my-ness goes away. ~ Dada Bhagwan

To allow someone, anyone, to suffer is the greatest sin there is. ~ Patrick Ness

Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over. ~ Jonathan Van Ness

I don't think so," the Mayor buzzes -
And my feet stop running -
But then I pick up one -
And then the other -
And I'm running for it again -
I hear the Mayor laugh behind me. "Well done," he says. ~ Patrick Ness

Then she said, with mock horror, "She's going to bring some of her old wigs, if you can believe it." She rubbed her bare head with her free hand. "I'll look like a zombie Margaret Thatcher. ~ Patrick Ness

The wind picks up a little more (Terribly sorry, I imagine it saying; apparently, the wind is British, wondering how it got all the way over here) ~ Patrick Ness

Despair was one thing, despair had a component of energy, despair grappled and fought, despair needed you alive to feel its pain, but sadness, sadness was something else altogether. Sadness was a slow vampire. Sadness reached in and uncorked you like a full tub. Sadness was the parasite that killed its host. ~ Patrick Ness

Schooling ain't life."
"Ain't it?" she says, her eyebrows raising in mock surprise. ~ Patrick Ness

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. ~ Patrick Ness

No one would barbecue their family dog. Why is a cow or a pig or a chicken different? ~ Mike Ness

Who is the pinnacle of male-ness in America? Leonardo DiCaprio. ~ Henry Zebrowski

Sometimes you need things rather than just thoughts. ~ Patrick Ness

He didn't want to go and look. But at the same time, a part of him wanted to look more than anything. ~ Patrick Ness

We've got now,' ( ... ) 'And I've got you. And that's all I want. ~ Patrick Ness

At the very beginning, when the PR industry was invented, some 110 years ago, about 95 percent of the relations in politics and in busi- ness were hidden from the public - only the convenient information was made available, no more than 5 percent. ~ Maxim Behar

What is this place? Jurassic Park? ~ Mark A. Cooper

We're lucky Esme thought to add an extra room. No one was planning for Ness-Renesmee."
I frowned at him, my thoughts channeled down a less pleasant path.
"Not you too," I complained.
"Sorry, love. I hear it in their thoughts all the time, you know. It's rubbing off on me.
I sighed. My baby, the sea serpent. Maybe there was no help for it. Well, I wasn't giving in. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Your stomach isn't the boss of you,' Mel says evenly.
'Oh,' Jared says, realizing. 'Sorry-'
Mel shakes her head, brushing it off. 'Not what I meant. Your heart isn't the boss of you other. Thinks it is. Isn't. You can always choose. Always.'
'You can't choose not to feel,' Henna says.
'But you can choose how to act. ~ Patrick Ness

Easygoing"--that was the world people used, and in time she became suspicious of anyone who could be described in such terms. What was so easy about going? ~ Laura Van Den Berg

The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism, said the monster. ~ Patrick Ness

My dad loved Scotland, so we would pile into his caravan and head for the Highlands, to Fort William and Loch Ness. It was such an adventure - my siblings and I were allowed to roam and explore the local beaches. We loved the freedom of those trips. ~ Rick Astley

To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself. ~ Audre Lorde

We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren't anything else. ~ Patrick Ness

People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake ... You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. ~ Errol Morris

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

And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all. Conor ~ Patrick Ness

I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready. ~ Joseph Kanon

It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that - the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop? ~ Mary Roach

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. ~ Patrick Ness

There's her silence, loud as a roar, pulling at me like the greatest sadness ever, like I want to take it and press myself into it and just disappear forever down into nothing.
What a relief that would feel like right now. What a blessed relief. ~ Patrick Ness

And that would be the end. So many ends. ~ Patrick Ness

("I knew it," Conor grumbled. "These kinds of stories always have stupid princes falling in love." He started walking back to the house. "I thought this was going to be good.")
(With one swift movement, the monster grabbed Conor's ankles in a long, strong hand and flipped him upside down, holding him in mid-air so his T-shirt rucked up and his heartbeat thudded in his head.)
(As I was saying, said the monster.) ~ Patrick Ness

Funny how you can forget that every family isn't like yours. ~ Patrick Ness

Too much talking," I say. "Not enough running. ~ Patrick Ness

Good actions bring good results, bad
actions bring bad results. Don't expect the gods to do thing for you, or the angles and guardian deities to protect you, or the auspicious days to help you. These things aren't true. Don't believe in them. If you believe in them, you will suffer. You will always be waiting for the right day, the right month, the right year, the angels, or the guardian deities. You'll only suffer that way. Look into your own actions and speech, into your kamma. Doing good, you inherit good- ness, doing bad you inherit badness. ~ Ajahn Chach

Instead she looked very hard at the woman's chin. On it was a single white hair - visible even in the heavy dusk - that closely resembled a piece of thread hanging off a scrap of fabric.

The woman forgot about Rusty for a moment. "I call her Hephzibah," she said with pride. "It's taken years for her to grow. ~ Ness Kingsley

You and I are both life. There's just the experience of every moment. We like to call them moments. There isn't really such a thing. There's just is-ness; there's just eternity. ~ Frederick Lenz

My default is to be really critical of myself, but the world will do that for me, so I gotta make sure I always know I have my back. ~ Jonathan Van Ness

You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is like. But this very, very important quality of subjectivity, this quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, "I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me." That me-ness, M-E-hyphen, that is what really constitutes consciousness. ~ Antonio Damasio

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

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. ~ Patrick Ness