Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.”

— David Mitchell

352. “I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.”

— David Mitchell

353. “A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.”

— David Mitchell

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

358. “Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.”

— David Mitchell

359. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose.”

— David Mitchell

360. “Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

— David Mitchell

361. “Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

— David Mitchell

362. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!”

— David Mitchell

363. “A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

365. “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

366. “What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?”

— David Mitchell

367. “And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”

— David Mitchell

368. “As if Art is the What, not the How!”

— David Mitchell

369. “I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

371. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

373. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

377. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

383. “The river’s vowels and the trees’ consonants speak a not-quite-foreign language.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

386. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

391. “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

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

— David Mitchell

393. “Don’t let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.”

— David Mitchell

394. “Her oil-black hair’s sort of punky. She must use gel. I’d love to gel her gel in for her.”

— David Mitchell

395. “Clark Kent, aka Superman, is to leave his reporting job in the forthcoming issue of the comic. Initially I assumed he was protesting against all the nasty commenters on the Daily Planet website: the thousands calling him an arsehole without having paid for the paper, or complaining that he only got to save the world because of his posh upbringing on Krypton.”

— David Mitchell

396. “Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

— David Mitchell

397. “Like the best songs, you can’t see the next line coming, but once it’s sung, how else could it have gone?”

— David Mitchell

398. “She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.” I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.”

— David Mitchell

399. “True, I only properly started talking with Todd half an hour ago, but every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time.”

— David Mitchell

400. “I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood. My best mate.”

— David Mitchell