Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

354. “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

355. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

360. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

363. “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

364. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

370. “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

371. “Dr. Egret gives me the creeps. Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.”

— David Mitchell

372. “Ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “right,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

— David Mitchell

373. “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

374. “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

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

— David Mitchell

376. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

377. “Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace. You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. So.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

382. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

385. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

390. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Queen Mary was known as Bloody Mary because of the large number of people she killed. And also because of misogyny. She was the first properly crowned woman to rule as queen regnant, not just queen consort. You weren’t supposed to be able to do this job if you were a woman, so a lot of people didn’t like it. That may be why she gets the soubriquet ‘bloody’ when many of her male predecessors were responsible for more deaths – in battles as well as executions.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

398. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

399. “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

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

— David Mitchell