Top 100 David Mitchell Quotes
#1. It would be unthinkable to have a top-ten list of multiple narrative novels that doesn't include David Mitchell. 'Cloud Atlas' is the most obvious choice, but I have opted for Mitchell's slightly lesser known debut, 'Ghostwritten.'
Susan Barker
#3. The woman was sincere - bigots mostly are - but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed.
David Mitchell
#4. 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
#5. Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever.
David Mitchell
#6. 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
#8. The truth of a myth ... is not in its words but its patterns.
David Mitchell
#9. 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
#10. A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms
David Mitchell
#11. I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-grey cat melting out of the shadows.
David Mitchell
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.
David Mitchell
#15. The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you're over forty.
David Mitchell
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
David Mitchell
#19. Good moods're as fragile as eggs ... Bad moods're as fragile as bricks.
David Mitchell
#20. Why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most
David Mitchell
#21. To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom
David Mitchell
#22. A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat.
David Mitchell
#24. Archivist: And what if no one believes this truth?
Sonmi~451: Someone already does.
David Mitchell
#25. So who's expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?
David Mitchell
#26. Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.
David Mitchell
#27. I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.
David Mitchell
#28. I could tell you a hundred things, thinks Jacob, and nothing at all.
David Mitchell
#29. That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.
David Mitchell
#30. 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
#31. A Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still.
David Mitchell
#32. You underestimate humanity's ability to bring such evil into being.
David Mitchell
#33. Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.
David Mitchell
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days,
David Mitchell
#39. Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gun-dog & its master.
David Mitchell
#41. 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
#42. One Macaca fuscata is cleverer than two Homines sapientes
David Mitchell
#44. Most yarnin's got a bit o' true, some yarnin's got some true, an' a few yarnin's got a lot o' true.
David Mitchell
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we're happiest when surprised by something we didn't know we wanted.
David Mitchell
#49. Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.
David Mitchell
#50. Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit - it's virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless. Careerless!
David Mitchell
#51. Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers.
David Mitchell
#52. 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
#53. Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
David Mitchell
#54. 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
#55. A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind.
David Mitchell
#56. 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
#57. There ain't no journey what don't change you some.
David Mitchell
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. A trio of teenagers, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement.
David Mitchell
#61. I find geriatric prodigies much more interesting than child prodigies
David Mitchell
#62. 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
#63. Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
David Mitchell
#64. What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?
David Mitchell
#65. I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.
David Mitchell
#66. 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
#67. His skin's so tanned he could be Turkish or something
David Mitchell
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. Time in the wood's older than time in clocks, and truer.
David Mitchell
#72. Dogs hate foxes. Nazis hate Jews. Hate doesn't need a why. Who or even what is ample.
David Mitchell
#73. Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.
David Mitchell
#74. Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.
David Mitchell
#75. 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
#76. Smart'n'Civ'lize ain't nothin' to do with the color o' the skin, nay.
David Mitchell
#77. Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.
David Mitchell
#78. 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
#79. There's a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is.
David Mitchell
#82. ON A SAMPAN MOORED ALONGSIDE THE SHENANDOAH, NAGASAKI HARBOR Morning of July 26, 1799
David Mitchell
#84. 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
#85. I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.
David Mitchell
#86. after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager.
David Mitchell
#87. Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!
David Mitchell
#88. 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
#89. People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.
David Mitchell
#91. I asked, how is knowledge found?
'You must learn how to read, little sister,' he said.
David Mitchell
#92. 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
#93. I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and
David Mitchell
#94. 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
#95. Writing's a pathology," I say. "I'd pack it in tomorrow, if I could.
David Mitchell
#97. I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine.
David Mitchell
#98. A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.
David Mitchell
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