Patrick Ness Quotes

Every monster was a man first.

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

Violence is man re-creating himself.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

The problem here is with a human being, not with a monster, not with an animal. The human being does things that even the monster does not do, because the human is more sophisticated.

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their respective countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them. Man may be suppressed in this manner but he cannot be changed.

I had heard of the Cyclopes, and then of the tyrants, both savage inhabitants; but of the coming of this third race of monsters, armed with two-edged arguments, and fiercer than the burning shores of Taormina itself, I was unaware.

The scariest monsters are human beings and what we will do to each other.

Becoming a monster sometimes isn't a choice that you have. We're all that; we're all 'the other' in one way or another.

All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind.

There are no normal people, there are just different kinds of weird.

All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

It's not the fur or the fangs that make you a monster, not always. Sometimes, it's just where you draw the line.

I think that human beings are the most awful monster we have ever seen.

War makes monsters out of men.

I would say about individuals, A Individual dies when they cease to to be surprised. I am surprised every morning when I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil I don't accomodate, I don't accomodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere. I am still so surprised! That is why I am against it. We must learn to be surprised.

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

Don't you dare hit me in the head, you know I'm not normal!