Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by David Mitchell, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring David Mitchell quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 920 David Mitchell quotes for you to read and share.
Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth. -- David Mitchell
Now and then goldfish splish and gleam, like new pennies dropped in water. -- David Mitchell
An Anchorite was a girl who lived like a hermit in a cell, but in the wall of a church. A living human sacrifice, in a way. -- David Mitchell
A blue jay swoops onto a fungus-ruffled tree-stump by Hershey's grave, emits a volley of harsh jeers, then a breathy trill. -- David Mitchell
Bad things happen to realists. -- David Mitchell
I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-grey cat melting out of the shadows. -- David Mitchell
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. -- David Mitchell
All the seats were taken, and I had to squeeze into a three-inch slot. I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. The Diagonal People. -- David Mitchell
A twig snaps. I am intensely alive. -- David Mitchell
The older you get, the further back you feel a hunger for reading. Your view of that time changes. These people don't feel like impossibly distant specks down the reverse telescope of time. -- David Mitchell
One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars. -- David Mitchell
Secrets affect you more than you'd think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you? -- David Mitchell
You are the man. You have to take your dignity and self respect to the pawnbrokers. -- David Mitchell
My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, I'm sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I'm not sure the author knew, either. -- David Mitchell
In the next room a freckly girl Julia's age sat in a wheelchair. One of her legs wasn't there. She'd probably love to have my stammer if she could have her leg back, and I wondered if being happy's about other people's misery. -- David Mitchell
With legal aid now capped at the bus fare for a trainee solicitor to come and explain how to plead guilty, Rumpole desperately needed a more remunerative outlet for his legal knowledge. Inspired -- David Mitchell
Will I be some kid's dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine? ... Which girl's carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What's she doing right now? What's her name? -- David Mitchell
Dogs are much crueler than BAFTAs -- David Mitchell
I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans. -- David Mitchell
I'm shoutin' back more'n forty long years at myself, yay, ... Oy, list'n! Times are you're weak 'gainst the world! Times are you can't do nothin'! That ain't your fault, it's this busted world's fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, ... he don't hear me nor never will. -- David Mitchell
To implant belief ... is to dominate the believers. -- David Mitchell
People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK. -- David Mitchell
A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn't start crying. -- David Mitchell
Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay. -- David Mitchell
Books'll be back," Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. "Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It's not far away. The future looks a lot like the past. -- David Mitchell
Bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears -- David Mitchell
A journalist marries the news, Seymour. She's capricious, cruel, and jealous. She demands you follow her to wherever on Earth life is cheapest, where she'll stay a day or two, then jet off. You, your safety, your family are nothing, -- David Mitchell
There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else! -- David Mitchell
This world spins from the same unseen forces that twist our hearts. -- David Mitchell
Run across a field of daisies at warp speed but keep your eyes on the ground. It's ace. Pedaled stars and dandelion comets streak the green universe. -- David Mitchell
Marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don't be alarmed, and don't resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it's the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. -- David Mitchell
At odd moments she may fret over a blank in her memory, but soon a Pied Piper thought will come dancing along and her untrained mind will follow ... -- David Mitchell
Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever. -- David Mitchell
Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose on moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity ... it'd be now, no question. -- David Mitchell
The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven't got to buy crap you don't need," says Ian. "The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war. -- David Mitchell
the sky's sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words 'I am' dissolved into blue peace. He said it. 'The ocean.' You -- David Mitchell
The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake. -- David Mitchell
A wrongheaded world," sighed Shiloh Davydov, "where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed. -- David Mitchell
Ho' law an' Civ'lize ain't always the same, nay, see Kona got Kona law but they ain't got one flea o' Civ'lize. -- David Mitchell
ever written. I went to bed with it and read -- David Mitchell
Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Rideout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize 'I Must Go Down to the Seas Again' by Jason Masefield. We don't have to actually think about stuff. -- David Mitchell
This isn't lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator. -- David Mitchell
How Opulent the building had felt after my own parents' bland box of suburbia - one day, I promise, I'm going to live in a house like this. Another promise I've broken; at least that one was only to myself. -- David Mitchell
Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers. -- David Mitchell
I wish all this never had to change, says Rafiq, unexpectedly.
I'm pleased he's content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts. -- David Mitchell
Never too late. Shooting is prayer. And when civilisation shuts up shop, a gun'll be worth any number of university degrees. -- David Mitchell
Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation, and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being -- David Mitchell
Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow. -- David Mitchell
Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace. You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. So -- David Mitchell
The world runs on strangers coping. -- David Mitchell
Astronomers at the University of Bullshitshire have just found new evidence that, yes, teenagers really are the center of the universe.' -- David Mitchell
Thunder splits the rift where the Sun floods in. -- David Mitchell
Reality is the page. Life is the word. -- David Mitchell
Like, music expired with the Smiths"; -- David Mitchell
Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. -- David Mitchell
Sawing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy when you are eleven years old. -- David Mitchell
Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch? -- David Mitchell
Payday loans: "If you were the sort of person who was ever going to understand compound interest, you wouldn't be in this mess. We can literally put off the shitstorm until next week. I mean, next week! It'll probably never happen! -- David Mitchell
Girls fascinate in different ways. Try 'em one day. Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she'd save my life by falling in love with me. -- David Mitchell
One moment you're carrying this loveable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she's off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan. -- David Mitchell
The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, it
turns ever more perfect. And when it's perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits the
ground it gets all mushed up. So it's only absolutely perfect when it's falling through the air,
this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!. -- David Mitchell
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable. -- David Mitchell
That's the weird part: I know I don't know you. So how come I feel like I do? -- David Mitchell
I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine. -- David Mitchell
In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon. -- David Mitchell
The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you're over forty. -- David Mitchell
When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days, -- David Mitchell
Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors. -- David Mitchell
Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one - or a hired one, it matters not - to take you home. -- David Mitchell
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off. -- David Mitchell
A trio of teenagers, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement. -- David Mitchell
A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden. -- David Mitchell
Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. -- David Mitchell
Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war. -- David Mitchell
You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you. -- David Mitchell
If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it's Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It's as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald. -- David Mitchell
I know that don't sound senseful, but yarns 'bout Old-Un Smart an' flyin' dwellin's an' grown' babbits in bottles an' pictures zoomin' cross the Hole World ain't senseful neither but that's how it was, so storymen an' old books tell it. -- David Mitchell
The thought of covering her in anything is Byronically diverting. -- David Mitchell
False modesty can be worse than arrogance. -- David Mitchell
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is. -- David Mitchell
You said you envied your uncritical, unthinking sisters.
That's not quite the same as wishing to be one -- David Mitchell
Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late, but it's the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds. -- David Mitchell
Grin and bear it! Remember your heritage! You're a Japanese law-abiding straight! You grin and bear it until your Zimmer frame buckles and your drinking water is mercury oxide, and our whole country is one coast-to-coast parking lot. -- David Mitchell
His skin was blotched as a dying banana. -- David Mitchell
Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. -- David Mitchell
But it's the feeling of love that we love, not the person. -- David Mitchell
Time in the wood's older than time in clocks, and truer. -- David Mitchell
She'n'her bros at the school'ry'd made a new game, Zachry'n'Meronym on Mauna Kia, but Abbess say-soed 'em not to 'cos times are pretendin' can bend bein'. A whoah game it was, said Catkin, but I din't want to know its rules nor endin'.david -- David Mitchell
She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself. -- David Mitchell
A Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still. -- David Mitchell
The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I. -- David Mitchell
Dr. Upward was one of those Academy Award-winning Asses of Arrogance you find in educational administration, law or medicine. -- David Mitchell
If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished. -- David Mitchell
Linda shares her packet of Custard Creams with me, and Marion says "Picking is hungry work" in her bunged up voice, and I say, "Yeah, it is, Marion," and Marion's really happy, and I wish her life could be easier than it's going to be. -- David Mitchell
Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions. -- David Mitchell
The parlor was inhabited by a monstrous hog's head (afflicted with droop-jaw & lazy-eye), killed by the twins on their sixteenth birthday, & a somnambulant Grandfather clock (at odds with my own pocket watch by a margin of hours. Indeed, one valued import from New Zealand is the accurate time). -- David Mitchell
Shiroyama's heart stops. The earth's pulse beats against his ear.
An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth ...
... a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings. -- David Mitchell
Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases? ... We see a game beyond the endgame ... As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor. -- David Mitchell
I'd always worried but kissing's not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe in. -- David Mitchell
Who was blowing on the nape of my neck. -- David Mitchell
Soviet imperialism's as bad as American capitalism. -- David Mitchell
The truth of a myth ... is not in its words but its patterns. -- David Mitchell
To my hens, I'm a two-legged giant who throws them corn and keeps stealing their eggs. -- David Mitchell
Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! The I's we were yearn to breathe the world's air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? -- David Mitchell
A great teacher attains immortality in his students. -- David Mitchell
In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won't have heard of him because you're a musical oaf, but he's one of the greats. -- David Mitchell
Smart'n'Civ'lize ain't nothin' to do with the color o' the skin, nay. -- David Mitchell
Despair is as attractive as cold sores. -- David Mitchell
You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human. -- David Mitchell
If I was the pope, I'd've made Mrs. de Roo a saint. On the spot. -- David Mitchell
Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay. -- David Mitchell
Love is a big knot of whys. -- David Mitchell
Apparently we need snakes. They don't just hiss, bite and hamper maverick archaeologists. They're -- David Mitchell
Heresy is fissiparous, however. -- David Mitchell
One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself. -- David Mitchell
Mrs.Comb tightened her headscarf and wondered why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most. She could not understand it. She could not begin to understand. -- David Mitchell
The Ghost-Girl's lips was fixed in a bitter smile, but her creamy eyes was sad so sad but proud'n'strong too. -- David Mitchell
History admits no rules; only outcomes. -- David Mitchell
I'm not good with the low-level unexplained. I worry at such things. I'm quite relaxed about the great mysteries of the universe; when it comes to the existence of God, for example, I figure that, as with a good episode of Inspector Morse, I'll find out what's going on eventually. -- David Mitchell
The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs. -- David Mitchell
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate. -- David Mitchell
The body is the outermost layer of the mind. -- David Mitchell
Obscurity is Japan's outermost defense. The country doesn't want to be understood. -- David Mitchell
The impossible is negotiable.
What is possible is malleable. -- David Mitchell
Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction. -- David Mitchell
Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'? -- David Mitchell
War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins. -- David Mitchell
I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself. -- David Mitchell
Doesn't prove she's dumped you for a gym rat with the face of Keanu Reeves, the anatomy of King Dong, and the charisma of moi -- David Mitchell
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again. -- David Mitchell
Or, if he's feeling more poetic, it might be Now, Frobisher, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon, so ... let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards. -- David Mitchell
But it wasn't us, personally, who trashed the world," says Mo. "It was the system. We couldn't change it."
"Then it's not us, personally, taking your panels," says Hood. "It's the system. We can't change it. -- David Mitchell
Vets' fees. And the fifth curse is the kicker: the dread that you'll be the one who loses it all. -- David Mitchell
Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed! -- David Mitchell
You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. -- David Mitchell
Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well. -- David Mitchell
Laboring types surrounded me with bad teeth, parrot voices, and unfounded optimism. -- David Mitchell
My voice was jus' a duck fart in a hurrycane. -- David Mitchell
Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts. -- David Mitchell
Do soldiers feel this, when they get back from a war? The utter weirdness of utter normality. -- David Mitchell
If poor doomed Olly's a Radio 4 play, what am I?""
"You, Hugo," she kisses my earlobe, "are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you'd stumble across on TV at night. You know you'll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway. -- David Mitchell
I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there. -- David Mitchell
Nothing exists that cannot be synthesised. -- David Mitchell
For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that "the natural order of things" is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings. -- David Mitchell
Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you ... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same. -- David Mitchell
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us. -- David Mitchell
Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that? -- David Mitchell
I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character. -- David Mitchell
In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows. -- David Mitchell
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner. -- David Mitchell
These ... xistential qualms you suffer, they just mean you're truly human. -- David Mitchell
Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't. -- David Mitchell
War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery. -- David Mitchell
I put ten sugar cubes in my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can't be natural -- David Mitchell
Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows. -- David Mitchell
She didn't tell me to use a condom, so I didn't: a bit of a risk, but it's her risk, not mine, -- David Mitchell
One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground. -- David Mitchell
Bitch' is a stingless insult these days - it hurts like, I don't know, a celery-stabbing. -- David Mitchell
I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism "To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom ... " & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye. -- David Mitchell
Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce. -- David Mitchell
A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously. -- David Mitchell
This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves. -- David Mitchell
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. -- David Mitchell
The xcursion helped dislodge your ... sense of ennui? -- David Mitchell
The First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child. -- David Mitchell
What's the book like?"
"Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers! -- David Mitchell
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane. -- David Mitchell
You underestimate humanity's ability to bring such evil into being. -- David Mitchell
Goat tongue is a gift, you got it from the day you're borned or you ain't got it. If you got it, goats'll heed your say-so, if you ain't, they'll jus' trample you muddy an' stand there scornin'. -- David Mitchell
I'm not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga's "Poker Face"] -- David Mitchell
Archivist: And what if no one believes this truth?
Sonmi~451: Someone already does. -- David Mitchell
A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste. -- David Mitchell
the soul is on the edge of what's visible, like a clear glass marble in a jar of water, -- David Mitchell
Sitting under the candlenut tree in the courtyard is pleasant in the afternoon. Laced in shadows, frangipani & coral hibiscus ward away the memory of recent evil. The sisters go about their duties, Sister Martinique tends her vegetables, the cats enact their feline comedies & tragedies. -- David Mitchell
Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. -- David Mitchell
Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm."
"You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere? -- David Mitchell
The blue jay threads a flight-path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark. -- David Mitchell
What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. -- David Mitchell
Holly rubs her temples. "Are we talking ... vampires?"
Arkady groans. "On, the V-word! Here it comes again. -- David Mitchell
Today's the day I either change my life or I don't. -- David Mitchell
We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk. -- David Mitchell
Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick.
-Robert Frobisher -- David Mitchell
I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it. -- David Mitchell
Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not? -- David Mitchell
I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed. -- David Mitchell
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave. -- David Mitchell
I'm scared of the future. I'm scared of the past. I'm nervous at the moment. -- David Mitchell
A random sequence of seemingly unrelated events. -- David Mitchell
Remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer. -- David Mitchell
I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively. -- David Mitchell
Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs. -- David Mitchell
Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception. -- David Mitchell
Good moods're as fragile as eggs ... Bad moods're as fragile as bricks. -- David Mitchell
Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply ... seizing up?"
... "Do you know?"
... "I don't know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it's the only question, and that all the other questions are tributaries that flow into it ... Might the answer be 'love'? -- David Mitchell
Why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most -- David Mitchell
Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it's a scientific fact that virgins can't get pregnant. Stella told me. -- David Mitchell
Over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot. -- David Mitchell
She let him finish her sentences for her for so long that now he starts them too. -- David Mitchell
The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. -- David Mitchell
We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. -- David Mitchell
Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level. -- David Mitchell
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made. -- David Mitchell
Assent was indignant & universal -- David Mitchell
Anonymous, faceless homicides, he decides, lack the thrill of human contact. -- David Mitchell
Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it. -- David Mitchell
To quote an early mentor," I tell the kid, " 'A journalist needs ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability. -- David Mitchell
He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one. -- David Mitchell
one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is -- David Mitchell
All these people like my mother paying counselors and clinics to reattach them to reality; all of us people here paying Sony and Sega to reattach us to unreality. -- David Mitchell
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners. -- David Mitchell
it's like the British in Ireland in 1916' , says Oisir O'Dowd. 'The repeated the ageless macho mantra, "Force is the only thing these natives understand," so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed. -- David Mitchell
Growing old is an unwinnable campaign. During this war we witness ugly scenes. Truths mutate to whims. Faith becomes cynical transactions between liars. Sacrifices turn out to be needless excesses. Heroes become old farts, and young farts become heroes. Ethics become logos on sports clothing. -- David Mitchell
And there, in the background, the brite spring sky's sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me ... like the snow had done. All the woe of the words, "I am" seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.
Hae-Joo announced, "The Ocean. -- David Mitchell
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can. -- David Mitchell
The gabled eaves, with Legolandish civic pride, the church clock chimes nine golden times; an Alp rears up on every side; -- David Mitchell
The woman was sincere - bigots mostly are - but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed. -- David Mitchell
As if Art is the What, not the How! -- David Mitchell
Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon. -- David Mitchell
Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? -- David Mitchell
But, Henry, this is wicked!' But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. 'The weak are meat, the strong do eat. -- David Mitchell
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most. -- David Mitchell
I do not break my Sabbath fast in a whorehouse. -- David Mitchell
I Din't finish speakin' my cure 'cos Roses schnockoed my face so hard the ground dived forward an' I crashed my jaxy. -- David Mitchell
Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon. -- David Mitchell
People're a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can't hold, needs for things you can. -- David Mitchell
Who decides which defects are funny and which ones are tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes. -- David Mitchell
Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen. -- David Mitchell
Marinus blows out a mouthful of air. Did close-range artillery knock any sense into you, or are we staying? -- David Mitchell
I'm not a great deep political thinker. -- David Mitchell
True, I only properly started talking with Todd half an hour ago, but every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time. -- David Mitchell
Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning. -- David Mitchell
When push comes to shove, what's Faust without his pact? Nothing. No one. We'd never have heard of him. -- David Mitchell
Mis'ry'n'barrassment are hungersome for blame -- David Mitchell
Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I.
Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sain', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds -- David Mitchell
Revolting' was the last word I ever spoke as someone who'd never kissed a girl. -- David Mitchell
One cannot cross the same river twice. -- David Mitchell
But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters. -- David Mitchell
The Ticket-wallah, whose pimples bubbled as I watched, was as intractably dense as his counterpart in King's Cross. The Corporation breeds them from the same stem cell. -- David Mitchell
For White man, life is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. -- David Mitchell
I'm not in the Scouts any more,' I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter. -- David Mitchell
When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly. -- David Mitchell
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? -- David Mitchell
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory. -- David Mitchell
Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced. -- David Mitchell
The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns. -- David Mitchell
Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by 5 A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and everything surges back toward the center, where mass densens for the next explosion. -- David Mitchell
Southly thru shrubby heath we tromped now till we got to wideway. Wideway I'd heard o' from storymen an' here it was, an open, long, flat o' roadstone. SAplin's'n'bush was musclin' up but wondersome'n'wild was that windy space. -- David Mitchell
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better. -- David Mitchell
Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. -- David Mitchell
I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back. Never throw a map away. -- David Mitchell
I can't make any promises ... I became a scientist because ... it's ike panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold. I- I don't know what I want to do ... '
'Journalists work in torrents just as muddy.'
The moon is over the water.
'Do ... whatever you can't not do. -- David Mitchell
Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. -- David Mitchell
A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind. -- David Mitchell
What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars. -- David Mitchell
After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X. -- David Mitchell
When people listen they make a listening noise. -- David Mitchell
You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there's some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other. -- David Mitchell
Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going. -- David Mitchell
I've seen every single episode. I think it might be my favourite programme. I enjoy it enormously. I also think it's shit. -- David Mitchell
At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds. -- David Mitchell
The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are. -- David Mitchell
I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there. -- David Mitchell
Fatalism's a weak antidepressant, but there's nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar's. -- David Mitchell
What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's. -- David Mitchell
Preemptive strike,' said Huw, 'must mean not declaring war until your cameras are in position. -- David Mitchell
What is it that ties shapes of land to the human heart, Mo? -- David Mitchell
Olly's glowing; if he was six inches tall and fluffy, Toys R Us would ship him by the thousands. -- David Mitchell
When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end. -- David Mitchell
Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters. -- David Mitchell
Summer has taken a sensuous turn: Ayrs's wife and I are lovers. Don't alarm yourself! Only in the carnal sense. -- David Mitchell
A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat. -- David Mitchell
The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun. -- David Mitchell
The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life. -- David Mitchell
The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral. -- David Mitchell
Ink, thinks Jacob, you most fecund of liquids... -- David Mitchell
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye. -- David Mitchell
Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may reach conclusions you didn't see coming. -- David Mitchell
I play chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn't a mind of digital code but Dad: It's Dad's attacks I repel; Dad's defenses I dismantle; Dad's king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable. -- David Mitchell
I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People. -- David Mitchell
Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents. -- David Mitchell
One Macaca fuscata is cleverer than two Homines sapientes -- David Mitchell
Clocks measure arbitrary meters of time, but not its speed. Nobody knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. Nobody knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much TIME do we have?
This day? -- David Mitchell
Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time. -- David Mitchell
Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice. -- David Mitchell
The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. -- David Mitchell
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature. -- David Mitchell
A city is a sea that you lose things in. You only find things that other people have lost. -- David Mitchell
Come, Adam, a wise man does not step betwixt the beast & his meat. -- David Mitchell
Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me. -- David Mitchell
Places change you, Miss Timms, and deserts change us pale northerners so much, our own mothers wouldn't recognize us. -- David Mitchell
We cut a pack of cards called historical context- our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks and queens. Adrian's cut threes, fours, and fives. That's all. -- David Mitchell
Stella says older men make better lovers; with boys our age, she says, the ice cream melts once the cone's in your hand. -- David Mitchell
Does the Japanese race, wonders Jacob, derive gratification from self-inflicted misery? -- David Mitchell
Lavender's my favorite scent, after White-Out and bacon rind. I sat down on the steps, not sure where to go next.
A July afternoon yawned.
Mirage puddles'd shimmered on the Welland road as I rode here.
I could've gone to sleep on the baked doorstep.
Little naked ants. -- David Mitchell
Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices. -- David Mitchell
(both circumvented the handicap of deafness by answering only those questions they believed had been asked & accepting only those answers they believed had been uttered - a stratagem embraced by many an American advocate) -- David Mitchell
Life is sheer bliss when it wants to be. -- David Mitchell
Clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all. -- David Mitchell
Think larger. Redraw what is possible. -- David Mitchell
A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice. -- David Mitchell
Do you know? He says. I feel I've known you for years, not ninety minutes. -- David Mitchell
What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character? -- David Mitchell
Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love. -- David Mitchell
When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind. -- David Mitchell
The world's twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. -- David Mitchell
Flamelight danced with shadows round them unloved walls. -- David Mitchell
Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling. -- David Mitchell
London is a language. I guess all places are. -- David Mitchell
I could tell you a hundred things, thinks Jacob, and nothing at all. -- David Mitchell
Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. -- David Mitchell
Once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back. -- David Mitchell
People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go. -- David Mitchell
The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me. -- David Mitchell
Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter. -- David Mitchell
Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted. -- David Mitchell
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points. -- David Mitchell
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning. -- David Mitchell
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. -- David Mitchell
There ain't no journey what don't change you some. -- David Mitchell
If only,' Shiroyama dreams, 'human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders. -- David Mitchell
With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we're happiest when surprised by something we didn't know we wanted. -- David Mitchell
Hesitations're yeses or nos if the questioner already knows the answer. -- David Mitchell
Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach. -- David Mitchell
Trees're always a relief, after people. -- David Mitchell
How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body? -- David Mitchell
London darkens the map like England's bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here. -- David Mitchell
If you don't want the fish, why do you catch them?" A few seconds pass. "For the quality of the conversation. -- David Mitchell
Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor. -- David Mitchell
I got a six'n'six so maybe my luck was healin', so I thinked, fool o' fate what I am, yay, what we all are. -- David Mitchell
It's not just the person who fills a house, it's their I'll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses. -- David Mitchell
The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds; the stagnant air reeked of insecticide. -- David Mitchell
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door. -- David Mitchell
Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason. -- David Mitchell
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will. -- David Mitchell
The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. -- David Mitchell
A man like me has no business with this substance "beauty," yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart. -- David Mitchell
Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better. -- David Mitchell
Facet of existence that only a few hundred in history have glimpsed, but so what? I could hardly tell -- David Mitchell
A handful of gems from Somni:
"One's environment is a key to one's identity."
"An impulse can be both vaguely understood and strong."
"What is knowledge for, if not used to better our/one's existence?"
"My IQ may be higher but she looked more content then I felt. -- David Mitchell
Uncle Tarmac says vehicles always resemble their owners, and likes advising my female cousins to judge whether boyfriends will make decent husbands or not by observing how they treat or mistreat their cars. -- David Mitchell
All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities. -- David Mitchell
I'm about to tell Jonah about the safari Dad's going to take me on, but Mrs. Marconi says talking's like ping-pong: you take turns. -- David Mitchell
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you're afraid of them. -- David Mitchell
All boundaries are conventions. -- David Mitchell
They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. -- David Mitchell
Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff. -- David Mitchell
No one's ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not. -- David Mitchell
Us f'gotten slaves was bein' drained by hunger'n'pain an' the mozzies from the slopin' pond now an' we was envyin' that Hawi boy diresome, till at a nod from Lyons they ripped down Elfy's pants an' held him an' busted that boy's ring, oilin' his hole up with lardbird fat b'tween turns. -- David Mitchell
So many things there are to know. Most things happen because of mistakes. -- David Mitchell
Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do. -- David Mitchell
We live on, as long as there are people to live on in. -- David Mitchell
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day. -- David Mitchell
Clark Kent gives up his powers just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed. Who'd make such a stupid swap? If you could fly? Deflect nuclear missiles into space? Turn back time by spinning the planet in reverse? Sexual intercourse can't be that good. -- David Mitchell
Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn't, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would. -- David Mitchell
Four construction workers sit around four greasy bowls in silence. The cook, an old man who died several days ago, has been allowed to rot on his stool. The single round light is dappled with the bodies of dead insects, and the walls are decorated with spatters and dribbles of grease. -- David Mitchell
I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears. -- David Mitchell
Yay, Old Uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds, an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more. -- David Mitchell
I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers. -- David Mitchell
My friend is composing an epic in Byronic stanzas entitled "True History of Autua, Last Moriori" & interrupts my journal writing to ask what rhymes with what: - "Streams of blood"? "Themes of mud"? "Robin Hood"? -- David Mitchell
For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of. -- David Mitchell
But the paranormal is persuasive; why else does religion persist? -- David Mitchell
Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present. -- David Mitchell
The wisdom of skin is underappreciated. -- David Mitchell
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat -- David Mitchell
It's not a girl's glittering personality that men're interested in, Holly. It never bloody is. -- David Mitchell
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction -- David Mitchell
As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent. -- David Mitchell
Humor is the ovum of dissent, -- David Mitchell
My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. -- David Mitchell
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. -- David Mitchell
Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes. -- David Mitchell
Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such -- David Mitchell
Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility. -- David Mitchell
I lied, yes, but that doesn't make me a liar. Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, small wrong may be a big right. -- David Mitchell
Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it. -- David Mitchell
Writing is such a damn lonely sickness. -- David Mitchell
To list and name people ... is to subjugate them. -- David Mitchell
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right. -- David Mitchell
So you're reinstating the law of the jungle?" asks Mo.
"You were bringing it back, every time you filled your tank. -- David Mitchell
The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it. -- David Mitchell
After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him. -- David Mitchell
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself. -- David Mitchell
Maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it -- David Mitchell
When a woman is interested in you, she'll let you know; if not, there's no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind. -- David Mitchell
You look for your meaning. You find it, and at that moment, your meaning changes, and you have to start all over again. -- David Mitchell
People buy such bollocks at museums. They don't know what else to do once they're there. -- David Mitchell
So we surrender to stupidity, do we? Freedom of speech is sacrificed at the altar of manufactured rage. -- David Mitchell
Now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework. -- David Mitchell
We were, to quote the proverb,
The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something ... -- David Mitchell
That's the problem with boys: They tend to help you only 'cause they fancy you, but there's no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it's too late. -- David Mitchell
Guys are all sperm-guns. -- David Mitchell
All rising suns set. -- David Mitchell
Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time. -- David Mitchell
People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function. -- David Mitchell
Believe nothing till it's officially denied. -- David Mitchell
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term. -- David Mitchell
Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die. -- David Mitchell
The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"
as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How! -- David Mitchell
The dust was deep and crisp and even. -- David Mitchell
We din't speak much from then 'cos speakin' can be heard by spyers what you can't spy. -- David Mitchell
Now, I'd got diresome hole-spew that day 'cos I'd ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa, -- David Mitchell
I remain thankful to God for all his mercies. -- David Mitchell
Like the best songs, you can't see the next line coming, but once it's sung, how else could it have gone? -- David Mitchell
Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. -- David Mitchell
I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too. -- David Mitchell
Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day. -- David Mitchell
Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree. -- David Mitchell
Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. -- David Mitchell
So who's expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now? -- David Mitchell
It's a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind. -- David Mitchell
So how does it feel? is the reasonable question you hear a lot when your book completes the long ascent from production purgatory to movieplex. -- David Mitchell
Mum said I'd learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone's dream is the unforgivable one. -- David Mitchell
This is how to control entire populations - don't suppress news, but make it so dumb and dull that nobody has any interest in it. -- David Mitchell
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. -- David Mitchell
Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden. -- David Mitchell
And she looks like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was getting. I -- David Mitchell
Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King's Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid - any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men's lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day. -- David Mitchell
Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality -- David Mitchell
He sifts the radio waves, but it's all men singing like women and women singing like men ... -- David Mitchell
The river's vowels and the trees' consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language. -- David Mitchell
For She's a Squishy Marshmallow -- David Mitchell
Don't let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought. -- David Mitchell
& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker. -- David Mitchell
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier. -- David Mitchell
All rising suns set, Archivist. [...] All revolutions are [fantacy, lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. [...] I was not genomed to alter history, [...] no revolutionary ever was. -- David Mitchell
Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. -- David Mitchell
These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all. -- David Mitchell
Nothing often poses in men as wisdom. -- David Mitchell
If you don't fit into the system, the system makes life hell. -- David Mitchell
They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge). -- David Mitchell
The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms. -- David Mitchell
A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms -- David Mitchell
She pulsed, invisibly, like a quasar. I can't describe women, but if you know Duke Pearson's 'After the rain', she was as beautiful and pure as that. Real things had happened to her to make her how she was and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book. -- David Mitchell
The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice. -- David Mitchell
It was only a wasp,' I say, 'there are plenty more where they came from.' This is not good enough for Tomomi: 'There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay? -- David Mitchell
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love. -- David Mitchell
Civilisation's like the economy or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies. -- David Mitchell
I watched the stars and thought of other lives. -- David Mitchell
Too cowardly to be a warrior, but not enough of a coward to lie down and roll over like a good doggy. -- David Mitchell
Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me. -- David Mitchell
Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out! -- David Mitchell
Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous. -- David Mitchell
I find geriatric prodigies much more interesting than child prodigies -- David Mitchell
Being born's a hell of a lottery. -- David Mitchell
Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat. -- David Mitchell
A time is one's own, Eva, when oneself and one's peers take the same things for granted, without thinking about it. Likewise, a man is ruined when the times change but he does not. Permit me to add, empires fall for the same reason. -- David Mitchell
We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants. -- David Mitchell
I und'standed why Meronym'd not said the hole true 'bout Prescience Isle an' her tribe too. People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin 'em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours. Old -- David Mitchell
I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error. -- David Mitchell
I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He'd spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood. My best mate. -- David Mitchell
But Ed Brubeck's a guy, like Vinny's a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns. -- David Mitchell
Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all -- David Mitchell
Crispin Hershey!" Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I'm the sun god Ra. "Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say. -- David Mitchell
Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime. -- David Mitchell
The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature. -- David Mitchell
I recognised love. It forms like a weather pattern. -- David Mitchell
An' that cold hand o' wind was Old Georgie's hand, yay, the devil what was standin' there wavin' a crookit spoon. -- David Mitchell
If you go up there Old Georgie'll freeze you an' dig out your soul with a cruel'n'crookit spoony an' eat it so you'll never even be reborned an' your body'll be turned into a frostbited boulder. -- David Mitchell
Horses are moody quad-bikes that piss on your boot and cost thousands in vets' fees. -- David Mitchell
The Rottnest Light is a stumpy middle finger sticking up from the a rocky rise, grunting, Sit on this, mate. -- David Mitchell
Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We -- David Mitchell
Shit, meet Fan. Fan, this is Shit. -- David Mitchell
Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. -- David Mitchell
You can't go changing what you've already set down, not without botching things up even more -- David Mitchell
My dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned. -- David Mitchell
Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. -- David Mitchell
Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo. -- David Mitchell
The belly craves food, she thinks,
The tongue craves water,
The heart craves love, and
The mind craves stories. -- David Mitchell
.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale. -- David Mitchell
When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. -- David Mitchell
Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies. -- David Mitchell
Dogs hate foxes. Nazis hate Jews. Hate doesn't need a why. Who or even what is ample. -- David Mitchell
A clock with no hands. "Freedom!" is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is. A -- David Mitchell
A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it. -- David Mitchell
The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken. -- David Mitchell
And if you'd swap your metalife for a bone clock's snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades! -- David Mitchell
The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes. -- David Mitchell
The cat looks at her and meows, Feed me, for I am beautiful. Orito -- David Mitchell
But it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all. -- David Mitchell
Are you what you believe yourself to be? -- David Mitchell
Regret' implies a freely chosen, but erroneous, action; free will plays no part in my story. -- David Mitchell
Desperately looking for a vital but lost bit of paperwork or just frantically masturbating to the Eroica symphony. -- David Mitchell
Time needs time to be measurable. -- David Mitchell
That human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too. -- David Mitchell
Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gun-dog & its master. -- David Mitchell
There's no future in stories ... Stories are things of the past, things for museums. -- David Mitchell
A stunt kite writes on the blue with its pink tail. -- David Mitchell
Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true. -- David Mitchell
On bad days you wonder, 'Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife? -- David Mitchell
Sobering to think how one accursed night of baccarat can alter a man's social standing so irreversibly. -- David Mitchell
Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years. -- David Mitchell
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship. -- David Mitchell
Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up. -- David Mitchell
Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with! -- David Mitchell
Art feasts upon its maker -- David Mitchell
Every nowhere is somewhere[...] -- David Mitchell
Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don't work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. -- David Mitchell
The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun. -- David Mitchell
Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower. -- David Mitchell
Men invented money Women invented mutual aid -- David Mitchell
One loses one's eye in the lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens. -- David Mitchell
Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely. -- David Mitchell
The purpose of modern warfare is to slay as many civilians as possible. -- David Mitchell
War's never a picnic. Although obviously soldiers do end up eating outdoors quite a lot. -- David Mitchell
That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities. -- David Mitchell
My soul may be stoned an' my luck may be rotted but I can still cuss a cuss -- David Mitchell
Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that's twenty-four thousand seconds to go. -- David Mitchell
...books may speak, but they do not listen. -- David Mitchell
I understood that one's environment is a key to one's identity, but that my environment, Papa Song's, was a key I had lost. -- David Mitchell
Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them. -- David Mitchell
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. -- David Mitchell
I pass through many Me's in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them. -- David Mitchell
I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. -- David Mitchell
Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it? -- David Mitchell
Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you. -- David Mitchell
Assured her I've never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now, -- David Mitchell
Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it. -- David Mitchell
No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed. -- David Mitchell
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. -- David Mitchell
Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It's simply part of being human. -- David Mitchell
The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting. -- David Mitchell
ON A SAMPAN MOORED ALONGSIDE THE SHENANDOAH, NAGASAKI HARBOR Morning of July 26, 1799 -- David Mitchell
My role was to pulse at the edge of the universe of the faithful, alone in the darkness. An outrider. A herald. -- David Mitchell
Ruddy hell, the cold smacked my face with an iron spade! Now I knew why northerners go in for beards, woad, and body grease. -- David Mitchell
Well wakey fucking wakey, sunbeam! Life's fucking Borstal! -- David Mitchell
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'. -- David Mitchell
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. -- David Mitchell
There's got to be a nasty or dangerous side to anything enjoyable or there's something wrong, something suspicious and hidden. If everything seems perfect, it means you're one of the Eloi and a Morlock is watching you with a napkin tucked under its chin. -- David Mitchell
Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong. I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation. -- David Mitchell
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage. -- David Mitchell
February's so gloomy in this part of the world", said Mrs. de Roo, "don't you think? It's not so much a month as a twenty-eight day long Monday morning -- David Mitchell
A Scot can turn a perfectly decent name into a head-butt. -- David Mitchell
It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. -- David Mitchell
A society where you're not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that's being ushered in. -- David Mitchell
Other boys mean questions have to get settled. Who's coolest? Who's hardest? Who's brainiest? Normal boys care about this stuff -- David Mitchell
Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos. -- David Mitchell
A hairy beggar kneeling by a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog. -- David Mitchell
Knowing what you're doing' largely involves pretending to know what you're doing. -- David Mitchell
So you're a sort of archivist for the future, -- David Mitchell
His deceased wife, watches her husband from the photograph on his console desk. -- David Mitchell
A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right. -- David Mitchell
...where there's Hilo, oh, there's blissweed. -- David Mitchell
Look at that! Life's more science-fictiony by the day. It's not just that you get old and your kids leave; it's that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in. -- David Mitchell
Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica. -- David Mitchell
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going. -- David Mitchell
You only value something if you know it'll end. -- David Mitchell
Through the side window, a screen of late-afternoon sunlight is projected onto the wall. Shadows of birds flit across it.
Some shadows are sharp, some shadows are blurry.
I've seen them before in another time and place. -- David Mitchell
In a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful. -- David Mitchell
Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence. -- David Mitchell
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves. -- David Mitchell
Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even. -- David Mitchell
Uncle Norm says, 'Pity is a form of abuse. -- David Mitchell
Listening's reading if you close your eyes. Music's a wood you walk through. -- David Mitchell
Do spirals end? Or just get so tiny your eyes can't follow any more? -- David Mitchell
Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. -- David Mitchell
The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it. -- David Mitchell
And then we hear a noise like ... a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits. -- David Mitchell
Just say, "It happened, but it's over," and get on with the ordinary stuff of family and life. -- David Mitchell
Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. -- David Mitchell
I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.' -- David Mitchell
I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all. -- David Mitchell
The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley; -- David Mitchell
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. -- David Mitchell
