Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

355. “The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage.”

— David Mitchell

356. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

359. “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

360. “But Ed Brubeck’s a guy, like Vinny’s a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

362. “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

364. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

367. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

370. “A history program on BBC2 that afternoon showed old footage shot in Ypres in 1919. That hellish mockery of a once fair town was my own soul.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

373. “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

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

— David Mitchell

375. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

378. “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

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

— David Mitchell

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— David Mitchell

385. “Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”

— David Mitchell

386. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

389. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

391. “No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld, but Mr. Evans swore the quadroon, Barnabas, was “the fleetest sheepdog who ever ran upon two legs.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

393. “At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

395. “Each square light, thinks Elf, is a life as big as mine.”

— David Mitchell

396. “Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, Ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. but outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

398. “The dumbstruck crowd parted as the murderer made his way to the nibblies table.”

— David Mitchell

399. “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

400. “Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go – corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature.”

— David Mitchell