Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Only the inanimate can be so alive.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

454. “Guys are all sperm-guns.”

— David Mitchell

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. 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

459. “That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

461. “To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.”

— David Mitchell

462. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

465. “At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.”

— David Mitchell

466. “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

467. “I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.”

— David Mitchell

468. “I wonder if “Anchorite” means “anchorman,” or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club–ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.”

— David Mitchell

469. “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

470. “Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green.”

— David Mitchell

471. “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

472. “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

473. “Heresy is fissiparous, however.”

— David Mitchell

474. “My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.”

— David Mitchell

475. “The blue jay threads a flight-path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark.”

— David Mitchell

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “Adam, my bro, an’ Pa’n’me was trekkin’ back from Honokaa Market on miry roads with a busted cart axle in draggly clothesies. Evenin’ catched us up early, so we tented on the southly bank o’ Sloosha’s Crossin’, ’cos Waipio River was furyin’ with days o’ hard rain an’ swollen by a spring tide.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

482. “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

483. “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

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

— David Mitchell

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— David Mitchell

489. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

492. “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

493. “The world runs on strangers coping.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

496. “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

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

— David Mitchell

498. “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

499. “It’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

500. “Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!”

— David Mitchell