Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Don’t let ’em say I killed myself for love, Sixsmith, that would be too ridiculous. Was infatuated by Eva Crommelynck for a blink of an eye, but we both know in our hearts who is the sole love of my short, bright life.”

— David Mitchell

253. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

254. “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

255. “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

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

— David Mitchell

257. “Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

259. “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

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

— David Mitchell

261. “Only a homeopath could believe that such a microscopic quantity of justice could have any beneficial effect.”

— David Mitchell

262. “But it’s the feeling of love that we love, not the person.”

— David Mitchell

263. “The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

267. “You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.”

— David Mitchell

268. “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

269. “The world’s twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal.”

— David Mitchell

270. “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

271. “You know, having the roof over one’s head dependent upon the good offices of an employer is a loathsome way to live. Christ only knows how the serving classes stand it.”

— David Mitchell

272. “Listening’s reading if you close your eyes. Music’s a wood you walk through.”

— David Mitchell

273. “My heart’s a clubbed baby seal.”

— David Mitchell

274. “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

275. “I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, small wrong may be a big right.”

— David Mitchell

276. “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

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. “The media’s obsession with conflict means that we’re confronted with it so relentlessly that we’ve stopped questioning why it’s there in the first place.”

— David Mitchell

279. “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

280. “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

281. “A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn’t start crying.”

— David Mitchell

282. “Sunrise bright as a silver dollar.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

289. “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

290. “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

291. “The cat looks at her and meows, Feed me, for I am beautiful. Orito.”

— David Mitchell

292. “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

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. “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

295. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet.”

— 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. “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

298. “Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

299. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell