Patrick Ness

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.

So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?"And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say. "Always," I say to him. "Every time.

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.

Being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.

A good idea always attracts other good ideas.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

And I put my hand on her arm to stop her rowing. Aaron’s Noise roars up in red and black. The current takes us on. “I’m sorry!” I cry as the river takes us away, my words ragged things torn from me, my chest pulled so tight I can’t barely breathe. “I’m sorry, Manchee!”?”“Manchee!” I scream. Aaron brings his free hand towards my dog. “MANCHEE!”?”And Aaron wrenches his arms and there’s a CRACK and a scream and a cut-off yelp that tears my heart in two forever and forever. And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside of me.

And then his noise falls completely silent-And he stops struggling-And looking right into my eyes-He dies. My Todd dies.

Death is not the end.

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

And she says, “Then let’s just take the effing road and get ourselves to Hav,Manchee comes outta the bushes and sits down next to me cuz I’ve stopped right there in the middle of a trail. He looks around to see what I might be seeing and then he says, ”Good poo, Todd. ” ”I’m sure it was, Manch,Know yourself and go in swinging, if it hurts when you hit, it might be real, too.

And yeah, I know most people would think it weird that two guy friends touch as much as we do, but when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too. This is how we work. I hope you get to choose your family and I hope it means as much to you as mine does to me.

Pity is an insult. Kindness is a miracle.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

War is a monster. War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows. And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

she is born in the breath of a cloud,If war is hard - and it is, forever and always - then after war is just as hard, in a different way.

The boy who refused to lose his soul.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be insid,And the pain is too much it’s too much it’s too much and my hands are on my head and I’m rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that’s inside of me.

HEREIt’s-Can I say?It’s like the song of a family where everything’s always all right, it’s a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it’s a song that’ll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.

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!,We share out craziness, our neuroses, our little bit of screwed-up-ness that comes from our family. We share it. And it feels like love.

But when you choose your family, you get to choose how it is between you, too.

Yeah, my parents are crappy, but you hurt either of my sisters and I will spend my life finding ways to destroy you.

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.

He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.

And I put my hand on her arm to stop her rowing. Aaron’s Noise roars up in red and black. The current takes us on. “I’m sorry!” I cry as the river takes us away, my words ragged things torn from me, my chest pulled so tight I can’t barely breathe. “I’m sorry, Manch,I wish I had a hundred years," she said, very quietly. "A hundred years I could give to you.

A man without a filter, is chaos walking,Blame is a human concept, one of its blackest and most selfish and self-binding.

He is worse than the others, I show. He is worst of all of them. Because–Because he knew he was doing wrong. He felt the pain of his actions–But he did not amend them, shows the Sky. The rest are worth as much as their pack animals, I show, but worst is the one who knows better and does nothing.

To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.

And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say.

And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men. “Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children. ”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two. We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us. “Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.

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

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.

We would do what we must. The world is big. Surely there is a space in it for one like you and one like me.

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.

THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.

If you ever doubt anything here, if you ever not know what to think or who to trust, you trust Todd, okay? You remember that.

If you ever want to see how small you are in the plan of God, just stand at the edge of an ocean.

The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.