Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— David Mitchell

303. “I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs and think dark thoughts.”

— David Mitchell

304. “The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable.”

— David Mitchell

305. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

307. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

311. “There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not –.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

313. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

315. “In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt’s sons’d been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you’ve got three sons, by Friday you’ve got none. Lady Albertina had just, y’know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

317. “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

318. “Despair is as attractive as cold sores.”

— David Mitchell

319. “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

320. “Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

— David Mitchell

321. “Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

324. “Time is the speed at which the past decays.”

— David Mitchell

325. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

326. “The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions.”

— David Mitchell

327. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

328. “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

329. “Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers.”

— David Mitchell

330. “I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.”

— David Mitchell

331. “Yay, when it came to faces, pretty lies was better’n scabbin’ true.”

— David Mitchell

332. “The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.”

— David Mitchell

333. “Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one – or a hired one, it matters not – to take you home.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

335. “The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage.”

— David Mitchell

336. “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

337. “Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

339. “But Ed Brubeck’s a guy, like Vinny’s a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns.”

— David Mitchell

340. “Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.”

— David Mitchell

341. “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

343. “Photographs make me forget if time is forwards or backwards. No, photographs make me wonder if there is a forwards or backwards.”

— David Mitchell

344. “My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.”

— David Mitchell

345. “A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.”

— David Mitchell

346. “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

347. “One cannot cross the same river twice.”

— David Mitchell

348. “Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans.”

— David Mitchell

349. “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

350. “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