Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

304. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.”

— David Mitchell

305. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

308. “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

309. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

312. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

318. “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

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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

324. “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

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

— David Mitchell

326. “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

327. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

332. “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

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

— David Mitchell

334. “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

335. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

339. “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

340. “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

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

— David Mitchell

342. “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

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

— David Mitchell

344. “I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

347. “Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant, but there’s nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar’s.”

— David Mitchell

348. “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

349. “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

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

— David Mitchell