Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— David Mitchell

304. “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

305. “What man ain’t the honestest cove in his own eyes?” Grote’s round face is a bronze moon in the dark. “’Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.”

— David Mitchell

306. “Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don’t you find?”

— David Mitchell

307. “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

308. “The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns.”

— David Mitchell

309. “Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace. You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. So.”

— David Mitchell

310. “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

311. “Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”

— David Mitchell

312. “Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation;.”

— David Mitchell

313. “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

314. “I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don’t think they are, and they’re just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there’s something illusory about that...”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

316. “However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.”

— David Mitchell

317. “Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.”

— David Mitchell

318. “Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion.”

— David Mitchell

319. “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

320. “Fear hardens caution, but boredom erodes it.”

— David Mitchell

321. “Remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer.”

— David Mitchell

322. “A history program on BBC2 that afternoon showed old footage shot in Ypres in 1919. That hellish mockery of a once fair town was my own soul.”

— David Mitchell

323. “A whoah game it was, said Catkin, but I din’t want to know its rules nor endin’.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

325. “My spine still works. That’s always useful.”

— David Mitchell

326. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

327. “Keeping track of each of us would drive God quite insane.”

— David Mitchell

328. “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

— David Mitchell

329. “Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce.”

— David Mitchell

330. “How the consumers seethed to buy, buy, buy! Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.”

— David Mitchell

331. “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

332. “The media – and not just The Washington Post – is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”

— David Mitchell

333. “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

334. “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

335. “Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that’s twenty-four thousand seconds to go.”

— David Mitchell

336. “Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.”

— David Mitchell

337. “To those upon the menu, the sauce is no concern.”

— David Mitchell

338. “Oh, eerie’n’so beautsome’n’blue she was, my soul was achin’.”

— David Mitchell

339. “People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

341. “But the idea that you can no longer trust your mind, that’s just about the most frightening thing there is. When you mess around with proportion or symmetry, or when doubt is injected into your perception of the laws of physics, your mind ceases to be a refuge. Your mind is no longer a safe house.”

— David Mitchell

342. “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

343. “I asked if I could ever learn to play like that. “No,” he told me, “because” -I’ll always remember this- “you haven’t lived my life and the blues is a language you can’t lie in.” But if I wanted enough, he said, then one day I’d learn to play like me.”

— David Mitchell

344. “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

345. “How improbable must a coincidence be before it’s a sign?”

— David Mitchell

346. “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

347. “Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, Ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. but outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle.”

— David Mitchell

348. “The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy.”

— David Mitchell

349. “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

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

— David Mitchell