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

— David Mitchell

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— David Mitchell

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— David Mitchell

311. “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

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

— David Mitchell

313. “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

314. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

321. “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

322. “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

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

— David Mitchell

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— David Mitchell

328. “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

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

— David Mitchell

330. “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

331. “Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

334. “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

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

— David Mitchell

336. “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

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

— David Mitchell

338. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

339. “Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

341. “Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such.”

— David Mitchell

342. “Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilites.”

— David Mitchell

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

348. “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

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

— David Mitchell

350. “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