Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “I wonder if “Anchorite” means “anchorman,” or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club–ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

353. “Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

355. “It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!”

— David Mitchell

356. “But reality creeps in wherever you live, however pretty the flowers are, however blue the sky, however great the parties. The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas.”

— David Mitchell

357. “Fear hardens caution, but boredom erodes it.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

360. “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

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

— David Mitchell

362. “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

363. “A whoah game it was, said Catkin, but I din’t want to know its rules nor endin’.”

— David Mitchell

364. “Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.”

— David Mitchell

365. “I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all.”

— David Mitchell

366. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

367. “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

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

— David Mitchell

369. “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

370. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— David Mitchell

377. “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

378. “Adam, my bro, an’ Pa’n’me was trekkin’ back from Honokaa Market on miry roads with a busted cart axle in draggly clothesies. Evenin’ catched us up early, so we tented on the southly bank o’ Sloosha’s Crossin’, ’cos Waipio River was furyin’ with days o’ hard rain an’ swollen by a spring tide.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

382. “I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.”

— David Mitchell

383. “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

384. “I understood that one’s environment is a key to one’s identity, but that my environment, Papa Song’s, was a key I had lost.”

— David Mitchell

385. “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

386. “You vowed never to trust any fabricant. You knew that Abolitionism was as dangerous and insidious a dogma as Unionism. You supported the resultant Homeland Laws dictated by the Beloved Chairman, wholeheartedly.”

— David Mitchell

387. “How improbable must a coincidence be before it’s a sign?”

— David Mitchell

388. “Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

— David Mitchell

389. “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

390. “The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy.”

— David Mitchell

391. “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

392. “People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

394. “No one else has lived this life.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

399. “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

400. “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