Top 100 David Mitchell Quotes
#1. The woman was sincere - bigots mostly are - but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed.
David Mitchell
#2. A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat.
David Mitchell
#3. Archivist: And what if no one believes this truth?
Sonmi~451: Someone already does.
David Mitchell
#4. So who's expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?
David Mitchell
#5. Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.
David Mitchell
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?
David Mitchell
#9. Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.
David Mitchell
#10. ON A SAMPAN MOORED ALONGSIDE THE SHENANDOAH, NAGASAKI HARBOR Morning of July 26, 1799
David Mitchell
#11. I asked, how is knowledge found?
'You must learn how to read, little sister,' he said.
David Mitchell
#13. 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
#14. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell
#16. A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.
David Mitchell
#18. Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.
David Mitchell
#19. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.
David Mitchell
#20. What's the book like?"
"Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!
David Mitchell
#21. Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.
David Mitchell
#22. Do you know? He says. I feel I've known you for years, not ninety minutes.
David Mitchell
#26. All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
David Mitchell
#29. 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
#31. My role was to pulse at the edge of the universe of the faithful, alone in the darkness. An outrider. A herald.
David Mitchell
#32. The river's vowels and the trees' consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.
David Mitchell
#33. Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.
David Mitchell
#34. Don't let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.
David Mitchell
#35. So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
David Mitchell
#36. Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?
David Mitchell
#37. I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
David Mitchell
#38. The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.
David Mitchell
#39. The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.
David Mitchell
#40. 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
#41. I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.
David Mitchell
#42. The Icon'ry, Aunt Bees said, held Valleysmen's past an' present all t'gether
David Mitchell
#43. I recognised love. It forms like a weather pattern.
David Mitchell
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true.
David Mitchell
#49. 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
#50. Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.
David Mitchell
#51. 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
#52. Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.
David Mitchell
#53. 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
#56. Apparently we need snakes. They don't just hiss, bite and hamper maverick archaeologists. They're
David Mitchell
#57. The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life.
David Mitchell
#58. Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.
David Mitchell
#59. Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
David Mitchell
#60. It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
David Mitchell
#61. Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted.
David Mitchell
#63. Listening's reading if you close your eyes. Music's a wood you walk through.
David Mitchell
#64. Horses are moody quad-bikes that piss on your boot and cost thousands in vets' fees.
David Mitchell
#65. The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds; the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.
David Mitchell
#66. 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
#68. Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
David Mitchell
#69. 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
#70. Now, I'd got diresome hole-spew that day 'cos I'd ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa,
David Mitchell
#71. I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
David Mitchell
#72. 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
#73. Regret' implies a freely chosen, but erroneous, action; free will plays no part in my story.
David Mitchell
#74. This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.
David Mitchell
#75. Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning.
David Mitchell
#76. Only the trombonist played on. That's trombonists for you.
David Mitchell
#77. To quote an early mentor," I tell the kid, " 'A journalist needs ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability.
David Mitchell
#78. Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?
David Mitchell
#79. Holly rubs her temples. "Are we talking ... vampires?"
Arkady groans. "On, the V-word! Here it comes again.
David Mitchell
#80. The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?
David Mitchell
#81. 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
#82. A hairy beggar kneeling by a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog.
David Mitchell
#83. When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly.
David Mitchell
#84. 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
#85. Might be dead and buried. V. well, there is more to E.'s & my pax
David Mitchell
#87. She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.
David Mitchell
#89. But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.
David Mitchell
#90. War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.
David Mitchell
#91. A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
David Mitchell
#92. A salaam aleikum. The elderly Irishwoman has a foamy cloud of white hair and a zigzag cashmere poncho. You wouldn't cross her.
David Mitchell
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I'm scared of the future. I'm scared of the past. I'm nervous at the moment.
David Mitchell
#98. 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
#99. This is peace, if you think about it--machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables.
David Mitchell
#100. I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.
David Mitchell
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