Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.”

— David Mitchell

352. “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

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

— David Mitchell

354. “Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself.”

— David Mitchell

355. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

358. “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

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

— David Mitchell

360. “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

361. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

364. “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

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

— David Mitchell

366. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

369. “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

370. “This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

— David Mitchell

371. “Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

374. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.”

— David Mitchell

375. “When I’m in doubt – as I am now – I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’ – and act accordingly.”

— David Mitchell

376. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

377. “The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

— David Mitchell

378. “Oh, eerie’n’so beautsome’n’blue she was, my soul was achin’.”

— David Mitchell

379. “Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

381. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

382. “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

383. “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

384. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

385. “European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences.”

— David Mitchell

386. “But the idea that you can no longer trust your mind, that’s just about the most frightening thing there is. When you mess around with proportion or symmetry, or when doubt is injected into your perception of the laws of physics, your mind ceases to be a refuge. Your mind is no longer a safe house.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

388. “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

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

— David Mitchell

390. “To list and name people... is to subjugate them.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

392. “But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged.”

— David Mitchell

393. “The corporations have money, power and influence. 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. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged.”

— David Mitchell

394. “It’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

395. “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

396. “Control is about fear, see. If you’re afraid enough of the reprisals, you don’t say no, you don’t fight back, you don’t run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal.”

— David Mitchell

397. “However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

399. “I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anemones know what to do.”

— David Mitchell

400. “Buttony eyes, stitched lips, frizzy hair, a face full of old regrets.”

— David Mitchell