David Mitchell Quotes

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

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head, ~ David Mitchell

Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator... ~ David Mitchell

Letting it go feels so sodding liberating. ~ David Mitchell

I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up. ~ 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

He sifts the radio waves, but it's all men singing like women and women singing like men ... ~ David Mitchell

Friendships between races, Ewing, can never surpass the affection between a loyal gun-dog & its master. ~ 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

Your power stations, your cars, your creature comforts. Well, you lived too long. The bill's due. Today. ~ 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

Odd how the wrong stories pop into one's head at my age. ~ David Mitchell

Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of . . . gay.'
'"Gay"? A merry activity?'
This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is . . . what creeps and poofters do.'
'So are you one of these „creeps"?
'No.'
'Then you are a „pooof-ter", whatever one is?'
'No!'
'Then your logic is eluding me. ~ David Mitchell

After the nuclear war, kids like them'll rule what's left. It'll be hell. ~ David Mitchell

Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day
as a votive offering to human knowledge
but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men
with one young woman
and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire. ~ David Mitchell

Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them. ~ 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

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

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction ~ David Mitchell

A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one. ~ David Mitchell

Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small? ~ David Mitchell

Now, I'd got diresome hole-spew that day 'cos I'd ate a gammy dog leg in Honokaa, ~ David Mitchell

Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws? ~ David Mitchell

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed. ~ David Mitchell

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much. ~ David Mitchell

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet. ~ David Mitchell

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment. ~ David Mitchell

The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. ~ David Mitchell

Nothing has changed, except everything. ~ David Mitchell

Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica. ~ David Mitchell

If an atrocity isn't written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That's what I can't stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it's made a tiny dent in the world's memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it's there. ~ David Mitchell

Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions. ~ 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

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell. ~ 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

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

He sees, and smells, that the mishap was caused by a large human turd. ~ David Mitchell

During those nine pouched-up months, what do babies imagine? Gills, swamps, battlefields? To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same. ~ David Mitchell

Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. ~ David Mitchell

There is no God but the one we dream up. ~ 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

Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow. ~ 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

All the woe of the words 'I am' seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. ~ David Mitchell

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

'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it? ~ David Mitchell

There's a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is. ~ 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 Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still. ~ David Mitchell

So many things there are to know. Most things happen because of mistakes. ~ 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

Thunder splits the rift where the Sun floods in. ~ David Mitchell

Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute. ~ David Mitchell

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war. ~ 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

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely. ~ David Mitchell

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs. ~ David Mitchell

Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what 'is' for what 'should be' pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; ~ David Mitchell

Oh, eerie'n'so beautsome'n'blue she was, my soul was achin'. ~ David Mitchell

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself. ~ David Mitchell

Okay, she's mad as a sack of ferrets. ~ David Mitchell

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun. ~ David Mitchell

Control is about fear, see. If you're afraid enough of the reprisals, you don't say no, you don't fight back, you don't run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. ~ David Mitchell

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error. ~ David Mitchell

It was a morning for Ella Fitzgerald. There are fine things in the world, after all. Dignity, refinement, warmth and humour, where you'd never expect to find them. Even as an old woman, an amputee in a wheelchair, Ella sang like a girl who could still be at high school, falling in love for the first time. ~ David Mitchell

Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. ~ David Mitchell

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. ~ David Mitchell

London darkens the map like England's bowel polyp. There is a whole country up here. ~ David Mitchell

Music's a wood you walk through. ~ David Mitchell

You only value something if you know it'll end. ~ David Mitchell

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps. ~ David Mitchell

If people praise you, you're not walking your own path. ~ David Mitchell

He chiseled open the fault lines in the others' personalities. ~ David Mitchell

Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well. ~ David Mitchell

What else has changes since 1984? Oil's running our, I say Earth's population is eight billion, mass extinction of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Aparteid's dead, as are the Castros in Cuba as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China's a powerhouse- though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state - and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffed cannibal. p 500 ~ 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

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

This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think. ~ David Mitchell

On my laptop, I have written "This Machine Kills Neocapitalism"! ~ David Mitchell

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. ~ David Mitchell

Humor is the ovum of dissent, ~ David Mitchell

The newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; ~ David Mitchell

Anonymity is grey, forgetting is magnolia. ~ David Mitchell

Beauty is immune to definition. ~ David Mitchell

You ask a starved man," Gerritszoon says, "to drink to a glutton. ~ David Mitchell

Look around. Walk. Find a cheap bed. Eat what the locals eat. Find a cheap beer. Try not to get fleeced. Talk. Pick up a few words in the local lingo. Just BE there, y'know? Sometimes," Brubeck bites into an apple, "Sometimes I want to be everywhere, all at once, so badly I could just ... Do you ever get that feeling? ~ David Mitchell

Coffee's the elixir of life. ~ David Mitchell

I watched the stars and thought of other lives. ~ David Mitchell

Alain-Fournier is ~ David Mitchell

Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi-451.
And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist. ~ David Mitchell

So, I asked 'gain, is it better to be savage'n to be Civ'lized?
List'n, savages an' Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o'jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not 'nuff to say so their hole tribe, but who knows one day. One day.
"One day" was only a flea o'hope for us.
Yay, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', but fleas ain't easy to rid. ~ David Mitchell

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. ~ David Mitchell

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish. ~ David Mitchell

A Scot can turn a perfectly decent name into a head-butt. ~ David Mitchell

That's writing, I suppose - dozens of decisions about what's in, what's out, what goes with what, what's clever but not honest, what's so honest that it's a truism, what's meretricious - and all just to produce one short sketch. ~ David Mitchell

Snow is bruised lilac in half light: such pure solace. ~ 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

A book can't be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant ~ David Mitchell

Blame its user, blame its maker, but don't blame the gun. ~ David Mitchell

It's diabolical." "It doesn't look all that bad to me." " 'Diabolical' means 'satanic,' sis." "Why's your maze so satanic, then?" "The Dusk follows you as you go through it. If it touches you, you cease to exist, so one wrong turn down a dead end, that's the end of you. That's why you have to learn the labyrinth by heart. ~ David Mitchell