Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.”

— David Mitchell

252. “Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow.”

— David Mitchell

253. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.”

— David Mitchell

254. “That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.”

— David Mitchell

255. “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers.”

— David Mitchell

256. “The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.”

— David Mitchell

257. “Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues.”

— David Mitchell

258. “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.”

— David Mitchell

259. “Such inbred, bovine torpor!”

— David Mitchell

260. “Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.”

— David Mitchell

261. “You said you could find an obscure recording for me by Robert Frobisher, Cloud Atlas Sextet.”

— David Mitchell

262. “This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.”

— David Mitchell

263. “Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation, and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being.”

— David Mitchell

264. “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our weapon is public outrate.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

266. “Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.”

— David Mitchell

267. “Anything is true if enough people believe it is.”

— David Mitchell

268. “It is a gift from your ancestors and a loan from your descendants.”

— David Mitchell

269. “Cowardice is nothing to do with it – suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”

— David Mitchell

270. “We’re in touch with the zeitgeist, but are too down-to-earth to be impressed. Who doesn’t want to come across like that?”

— David Mitchell

271. “Okay, so she’s mad as a sack of ferrets. Only I don’t tell her so ’cause I’d like more of that green tea.”

— David Mitchell

272. “With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we’re happiest when surprised by something we didn’t know we wanted.”

— David Mitchell

273. “Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.”

— David Mitchell

274. “Thunder splits the rift where the Sun floods in.”

— David Mitchell

275. “Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilites.”

— David Mitchell

276. “Us elderly are the modern lepers.”

— David Mitchell

277. “I put ten sugar cubes in my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can’t be natural.”

— David Mitchell

278. “If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.”

— David Mitchell

279. “A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat.”

— David Mitchell

280. “A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

— David Mitchell

281. “The mystery o’ fishing’s this,’ said Dean’s dad, ‘what’s the hook, who’s got the rod, what’s the maggot, what’s the fish?’ ‘Why’s that a mystery, Dad?’ ‘Yer’ll understand when yer older.’ ‘But ain’t it obvious what’s what?’ ‘It changes, son. In a heartbeat.”

— David Mitchell

282. “I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-grey cat melting out of the shadows.”

— David Mitchell

283. “The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,” says Ian. “The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war.”

— David Mitchell

284. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.”

— David Mitchell

285. “Gardener made a bonfire of fallen leaves – just came in from it. The heat on one’s face and hands, the sad smoke, the crackling and wheezing fire. Reminds me of the groundsman’s hut at Gresham. Anyway, got a gorgeous passage from the fire – percussion for crackling, alto bassoon for the wood, and a restless flute for the flames.”

— David Mitchell

286. “One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow.”

— David Mitchell

287. “Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small?”

— David Mitchell

288. “But reality creeps in wherever you live, however pretty the flowers are, however blue the sky, however great the parties. The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas.”

— David Mitchell

289. “Sunrise bright as a silver dollar.”

— David Mitchell

290. “People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing – while denying – that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.”

— David Mitchell

291. “It’s vital to our understanding of a complex world, and to our intellectual dexterity, to be able to hold two different concepts in our heads at once without assuming that they’re mutually exclusive.”

— David Mitchell

292. “Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”

— David Mitchell

293. “Do you think Britain is a great country? I do, basically. It’s embarrassing to admit it. And it feels un-British to admit it, except for the fact that it’s embarrassing, which is a very British sensation. Embarrassment is one of our strongest emotions.”

— David Mitchell

294. “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

295. “A random sequence of seemingly unrelated events.”

— David Mitchell

296. “All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

— David Mitchell

297. “Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.”

— David Mitchell

298. “Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.”

— David Mitchell

299. “Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

— David Mitchell

300. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell