“To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that’s not how a person with integrity acts.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“To allow someone, anyone, to suffer is the greatest sin there is.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“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. It ain’t the Spackle that drove us to the end. It was ourselves.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“Roads is never the fastest way to get nowhere,” the woman says. “Don’t ye know that?”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“History ain’t so important when yer just trying to survive,” I say, spitting it out under my breath. “That’s actually when it’s most important,” Hildy says,”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“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, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“But guessing a thing ain’t knowing a thing.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it’s dangerous, too, that it’s painful and risky, that it’s making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“But there’s always hope,” Ben says. “You always have to hope.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
“War is a monster,” he says, almost to himself. “War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows.” He’s looking at me now. “And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.”
― Patrick Ness, quote from Chaos Walking: A Trilogy
Patrick Ness
Born place: in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, The United States
Born date January 1, 1971
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“Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that s not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus teh struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Beneath the Wheel
“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, quote from The Road to Serfdom
“He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, quote from Winter Rose
“The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.”
― James M. McPherson, quote from Battle Cry of Freedom
“[John] ‘You guys saved me first,’ I reply.
[Sarah] ‘Yeah, obviously. So return the favor and save our planet.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Revenge of Seven
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