Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Because her laughter spurts through a blow-hole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. 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

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

— David Mitchell

254. “Such inbred, bovine torpor!”

— David Mitchell

255. “If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

257. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

258. “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

259. “Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection.”

— David Mitchell

260. “Sunrise bright as a silver dollar.”

— David Mitchell

261. “And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”

— David Mitchell

262. “It is a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

— David Mitchell

263. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

264. “I was tired of flying. Tired of that life, of the screams, of the faces, of the fame. So I quit. Fame molds itself onto your face. Then it molds your face.”

— David Mitchell

265. “The river’s vowels and the trees’ consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.”

— David Mitchell

266. “Probably” is a word with an emergency ejector seat.”

— David Mitchell

267. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

268. “Once I knew a stable-boy,” says Francis Bacon. “He used to say, ‘Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.’ I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?”

— David Mitchell

269. “Laboring types surrounded me with bad teeth, parrot voices, and unfounded optimism.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

271. “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

272. “Those there English gerrrrunts are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst direly an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance.”

— David Mitchell

273. “It’s a classy Victorian pub with brass fittings, upholstered chair backs, and NO SPITTING signs.”

— David Mitchell

274. “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

275. “Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

— David Mitchell

276. “What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We’ve advanced as a species because we’ve wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on.”

— David Mitchell

277. “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

278. “A stunt kite writes on the blue with its pink tail.”

— David Mitchell

279. “Us elderly are the modern lepers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

281. “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

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

— David Mitchell

283. “All the woe of the words ‘I am’ seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.”

— David Mitchell

284. “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

285. “When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.”

— David Mitchell

286. “I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother.”

— David Mitchell

287. “Corpocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned.”

— David Mitchell

288. “London is a language. I guess all places are.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

290. “The lounge is empty of bodies but full of debris: wineglasses, ashtrays, food wrappers, and a pair of silk boxer shorts over the Boer War rifle.”

— David Mitchell

291. “Life goes much more smoothly when everyone’s saying sorry. It’s the second most important social lubricant and, unlike the first, it doesn’t damage your liver.”

— David Mitchell

292. “When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

294. “Sit down a beat or two. Hold out your hands. Look.”

— David Mitchell

295. “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. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.”

— David Mitchell

296. “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

297. “Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

300. “Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it.”

— David Mitchell