Patrick Ness Quotes
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There's hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall.
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Viola? Keep calling for me– And I’ll keep searching for you– And I’ll find you– You bet yer life on it– I’ll find you– Keep calling for me, Viola– Cuz here I come.
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As long as I hold it as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will. I'm the one who allows it and I'm the one responsible.
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Happiness is precious, and so I prefer to keep mine private. In a world where everyone shares everything, I can think of a lot of happy moments, but they're mine.
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And you," he says, "you need to talk to your boy." He lifts my chin. "And if he needs saving, then you save him. Isn't that what you told me you did for each other?" I let go a few more tears but then I nod. "Over and over again.
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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.
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But,' he thinks, 'it's possible to die before you die.
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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?
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If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.
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And I look at her sitting there and she looks across the river and we wait as the dawn fully arrives, each of us knowing. Each of us knowing the other.
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Limitations can be hugely creative and hugely inspiring - so long as they are the ones you choose for yourself. I will not allow anyone to take anything off my palette, but if I do, then within that, I can be creative.
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Time goes on, even when yer not looking.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Here is the boy, drowning.
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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.
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Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.
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I meet blind and partially-sighted young readers all the time, and it's a shock that so few books are available to them.
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The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.
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Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now. But he was further away than ever.
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Stories are the wildest things of all. Stories chase and bite and hunt.
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The magical and fantastical isn't something I'm uncomfortable with in books, and I chafe slightly at the idea that a purely realist novel somehow has more value.
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How you leave the reader is so important - not the climax; I call it the 'exit feeling'.