Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Thunder splits the rift where the Sun floods in.”

— David Mitchell

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

316. “All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

319. “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

320. “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

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

— David Mitchell

322. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

325. “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

326. “Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

330. “Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

334. “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

335. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

339. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

344. “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

347. “Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.”

— David Mitchell

348. “A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, “Its wings are like cellophane,” and I say, “I was just thinking that,” but Jonah says, “Just thinking what?” so maybe I just thought he’d said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I’ve noticed it before.”

— David Mitchell

349. “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

350. “Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that’s twenty-four thousand seconds to go.”

— David Mitchell