Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony.”

— David Mitchell

452. “How improbable must a coincidence be before it’s a sign?”

— David Mitchell

453. “His skin’s so tanned he could be Turkish or something.”

— David Mitchell

454. “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

455. “This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

— David Mitchell

456. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.”

— David Mitchell

457. “If reason worked on alcoholics, there’d be no alcoholics.”

— David Mitchell

458. “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

459. “Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.”

— David Mitchell

460. “Now, lucky you can say, ‘Not standing up to him is giving him permission,’ but if you’ve been fed this diet since the year dot, there is no standing up. Victims aren’t cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on.”

— David Mitchell

461. “Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you’re asking to be picked on? Why’s it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages?”

— David Mitchell

462. “Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

— David Mitchell

463. “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

464. “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

465. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall.”

— David Mitchell

466. “For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.”

— David Mitchell

467. “Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even.”

— David Mitchell

468. “Nurse Noakes passed by and my fellow inmates all silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.”

— David Mitchell

469. “If you don’t want the fish, why do you catch them?” A few seconds pass. “For the quality of the conversation.”

— David Mitchell

470. “It’s never a good idea for politicians to get involved in comedy.”

— David Mitchell

471. “Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.”

— David Mitchell

472. “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

473. “Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.”

— David Mitchell

474. “All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. Some minds pulse consistently, some erratically. Some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some are very nearly not there. Some stay on the fringe, like quasars.”

— David Mitchell

475. “If we all just settle into small, mutually ignorant online support groups exchanging comforting half-truths, then civilisation is in for a rough ride. No one will know what is really going on, and working out what is really going on has, for most of history, been humankind’s main purpose. Losing that is a high price to pay for being able to order pizza without speaking to anyone.”

— David Mitchell

476. “If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.”

— David Mitchell

477. “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

478. “You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap – I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in – but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

— David Mitchell

479. “Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.”

— David Mitchell

480. “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”

— David Mitchell

481. “If I could express exactly what was most annoying, ungrateful and unreasonable about my own behaviour before the person I’d angered, then the situation would be defused. You can’t have an argument with someone who’s saying exactly what you’re thinking.”

— David Mitchell

482. “His favorite position is, uh, called ‘the Plumber.’ You stay in all day but nobody comes.”

— David Mitchell

483. “I s’pose if some man’s been inside you often enough, it’ll take a while to get rid of him. 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

484. “Since when, mocks the moon-gray cat, do cats need keys?”

— David Mitchell

485. “A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.”

— David Mitchell

486. “Are yer from New York, Max?” asks Dean. “No. I endured a childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” “It’s an idyllic name,” remarks Elf, “Cedar Rapids.” “Beware idyllic names in the New World.”

— David Mitchell

487. “This is peace, if you think about it – machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables.”

— David Mitchell

488. “Your place does keep you sane, but can also keep you lonely.”

— David Mitchell

489. “Listening to houses breathe makes you feel weightless.”

— David Mitchell

490. “The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.”

— David Mitchell

491. “Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true? said I. Yay, an’ it usually is, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, an’ that’s why true true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds.”

— David Mitchell

492. “I begged Yoona to stop, or at least to fake normalcy in the dinery: I was a well-orientated server in those days, you see, not the evildoer, the threat to civilization, I am now.”

— David Mitchell

493. “It ain’t savages what are stronger’n civ’lizeds, it’s big numbers what’re stronger’n small numbers. Smart gived us a plus for many years, but with ’nuff hands’n’minds that plus’ll be zeroed one day.”

— David Mitchell

494. “Some magic is normality you’re not yet used to.”

— David Mitchell

495. “Do soldiers feel this, when they get back from a war? The utter weirdness of utter normality.”

— David Mitchell

496. “The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.”

— David Mitchell

497. “I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found.”

— David Mitchell

498. “What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?”

— David Mitchell

499. “Why had Goose lied so? Why was he so determined no one.”

— David Mitchell

500. “Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat.”

— David Mitchell