Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

316. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

327. “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

328. “Foolproof depends on the size of the fool.”

— David Mitchell

329. “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

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

— David Mitchell

331. “Do either of you know clock patience? You have to add cards up to fifteen?”

— David Mitchell

332. “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

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

— David Mitchell

334. “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

335. “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

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

— David Mitchell

337. “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

338. “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

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

— David Mitchell

340. “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

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

— David Mitchell

342. “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

343. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.”

— David Mitchell

344. “That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.”

— David Mitchell

345. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

346. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

347. “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

348. “Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small?”

— David Mitchell

349. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.”

— David Mitchell

350. “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