Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.”

— David Mitchell

452. “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

453. “Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

— David Mitchell

454. “I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anemones know what to do.”

— David Mitchell

455. “Buttony eyes, stitched lips, frizzy hair, a face full of old regrets.”

— David Mitchell

456. “At your age – says Mr. Hughees -, you think getting old and dying’s what other people do. At my age, you think, Where did it all go? If you want to do something, do it. ‘Cause your turn to be in that box, it’s coming. No doctor, no diet, no nothing’ll keep it away. It’ll be here. Quick as – she snaps her fingers and Elf blinks – that.”

— David Mitchell

457. “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

458. “A hairy beggar kneeling by a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog.”

— David Mitchell

459. “People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.”

— David Mitchell

460. “You vowed never to trust any fabricant. You knew that Abolitionism was as dangerous and insidious a dogma as Unionism. You supported the resultant Homeland Laws dictated by the Beloved Chairman, wholeheartedly.”

— David Mitchell

461. “Middle age is flown, 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

462. “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

463. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

464. “Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

466. “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

467. “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

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

— David Mitchell

469. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

473. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

476. “Leaving a picture lets you see the whole frame.”

— David Mitchell

477. “Guys are all sperm-guns.”

— David Mitchell

478. “Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wide-worlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots – how do they do it? How do they know who they are?”

— David Mitchell

479. “He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.”

— David Mitchell

480. “Music leaks out of the Walkman, and a saxophone from long ago circles in the air, so sad it could barely leave the ground.”

— David Mitchell

481. “Musicians may be walking asscracks or they may be God’s mouthpiece on Earth, but punctual they ain’t.”

— David Mitchell

482. “There’s the blind, Mr. Grimaldi, there’s the willfully blind, and then there’s the soon to be retired.”

— David Mitchell

483. “I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.”

— David Mitchell

484. “If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.”

— David Mitchell

485. “What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing?”

— David Mitchell

486. “Regular memories are courtroom sketches, elaborated and eroded at every viewing.”

— David Mitchell

487. “Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.”

— David Mitchell

488. “A twig snaps. I am intensely alive.”

— David Mitchell

489. “Your power stations, your cars, your creature comforts. Well, you lived too long. The bill’s due. Today.”

— David Mitchell

490. “You know, we are all of us writers, busy writing our own fictions about how the world is, and how it came to be this way. We concoct plots and ascribe motives that may, or may not, coincide with the truth.”

— David Mitchell

491. “Aroma of fresh bread led me to a bakery where a deformed woman with no nose sold me a dozen crescent-moon pastries. Only wanted one, but thought she had enough problems.”

— David Mitchell

492. “Good for you. The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.”

— David Mitchell

493. “People found it much easier to believe in a rose-tinted view of the past than a utopian future. They still do: hence ‘Take Back Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’.”

— David Mitchell

494. “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

495. “A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labeled sane. If the model is different, you’re labeled a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labeled a schizophrenic and locked up.”

— David Mitchell

496. “Worship still happens here, thinks Jasper. Not of us four, but worship of music itself. Music frees the soul from the cage of the body. Music transforms the Many to a One. The Marshall stacks vibrate his skeleton. We touch something divine. His Stratocaster speaks of ecstasy and despair. We’re not gods, but we are channels for something that is godlike.”

— David Mitchell

497. “And she looks like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was getting.”

— David Mitchell

498. “Are you what you believe yourself to be?”

— David Mitchell

499. “Every arrival,′ ” quotes Vorstenbosch, ” ’is a particular death.”

— David Mitchell

500. “Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time.”

— David Mitchell