Patrick Ness Quotes

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

I am my heart's undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

I haven't had the time to plan returning to the scene because I haven't left it.

O, my past years in Rangoon are spectres to haunt my soul; and they seem to laugh at me as they shake the chains they have riveted on me.

Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place.

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

Your mind has a way of not letting you forget things you wish you could. Especially with people. Like, you'll always try your best to forget things that people say to you or about you, but you always remember. And you'll try to forget things you've seen that no one should see, but you just can't do it. And when you try to forget someone's face, you can't get it out of your head.

You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.

I think...she said finally, "that all of us have got our ghosts.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.

Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones.

Never while anything is left of me shall this... camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike.

It's just hard when you're someone who's like hurting a lot of people or deceiving people who trust you, not to bring some of that home with you or inside of you.

The mind wants to forget because it weighs so much on the heart and soul. I am tired of crying and feeling so helpless. I want to breathe again -just for a little while.

I think that shame is a universal, paralyzing, painful emotion.