Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

303. “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

304. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

313. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

320. “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

321. “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

322. “I walked along the pebbly beach. Plastic buoys. A sea coconut, shaped like a woman’s loins. Junk, washed up with the driftwood. Cans, bottles, rubber gloves, detergent containers. I heard grunts and squeals from under a peeling boat, never to float again. In the distance a shadow lit a fire.”

— David Mitchell

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose on moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity... it’d be now, no question.”

— David Mitchell

328. “All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

332. “We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

— David Mitchell

333. “Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

336. “Aroma of fresh bread led me to a bakery where a deformed woman with no nose sold me a dozen crescent-moon pastries. Only wanted one, but thought she had enough problems.”

— David Mitchell

337. “If reason worked on alcoholics, there’d be no alcoholics.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

339. “The blue jay threads a flight-path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark.”

— David Mitchell

340. “Eavesdropping’s sort of thrilling ’cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.”

— David Mitchell

341. “If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.”

— David Mitchell

342. “Nurse Noakes passed by and my fellow inmates all silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.”

— David Mitchell

343. “There is no God but the one we dream up.”

— David Mitchell

344. “Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself.”

— David Mitchell

345. “No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.”

— David Mitchell

346. “Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don’t have to watch them widening.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

348. “Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted.”

— David Mitchell

349. “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

350. “Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?”

— David Mitchell