Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Girls fascinate in different ways. Try ’em one day. Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she’d save my life by falling in love with me.”

— David Mitchell

402. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

403. “There’s a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is.”

— David Mitchell

404. “Olly’s glowing; if he was six inches tall and fluffy, Toys R Us would ship him by the thousands.”

— David Mitchell

405. “No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

407. “I play chess on my iPhone, and indulge in a fond fantasy that my opponent isn’t a mind of digital code but Dad: It’s Dad’s attacks I repel; Dad’s defenses I dismantle; Dad’s king scurrying around the board to prolong the inevitable.”

— David Mitchell

408. “A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it. Girls are the same, too, perhaps, in the morning.”

— David Mitchell

409. “People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pair of cottagers on the other.”

— David Mitchell

410. “Are there nor trrruuue Scortsmen in tha hooossse?”

— David Mitchell

411. “The sound is pristine, riverlike, spectral, hypnotic... intimately familiar. Luisa stands, entranced, as if living in a stream of time. “I know this music”.”

— David Mitchell

412. “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.”

— David Mitchell

413. “Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

— David Mitchell

414. “Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.”

— David Mitchell

415. “Eva. Every day I’ve climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, “To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.”

— David Mitchell

416. “Foolproof depends on the size of the fool.”

— David Mitchell

417. “Ah, Klaas! Dear Klaas reverted to compost many years ago.”

— David Mitchell

418. “If you’re ever going to throw a book at a wall, it’ll be during the next few pages.”

— David Mitchell

419. “Meanwhile, there’s no counterbalancing evidence that correctly applied apostrophes keep comma numbers down, or that the grocer’s ones encourage pesky hyphens.”

— David Mitchell

420. “If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.”

— David Mitchell

421. “What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing?”

— David Mitchell

422. “In the corridor outside, a trolley squeaks by. The brigadier I knew has left his bombed-out face, leaving me alone with the clock, shelves of handsome books nobody ever reads, and one certainty: that whatever I do with my life, however much power, wealth, experience, knowledge, or beauty I’ll accrue, I, too, will end up like this vulnerable old man. When I look at Brigadier Reginald Philby, I’m looking down time’s telescope at myself.”

— David Mitchell

423. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

424. “That’s the weird part: I know I don’t know you. So how come I feel like I do?”

— David Mitchell

425. “Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.”

— David Mitchell

426. “There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling. I’ve met it before.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

428. “Amsterdam wraps itself around itself: London unfolds, unfolds, unfolds.”

— David Mitchell

429. “Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.”

— David Mitchell

430. “The oblong of light is back and motes of dust swirl in the sunshine slating down the wall of books. Golden pollen.”

— David Mitchell

431. “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

432. “His favorite position is, uh, called ‘the Plumber.’ You stay in all day but nobody comes.”

— David Mitchell

433. “Who wins, you or the sony?” The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve? So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?”

— David Mitchell

434. “Other boys mean questions have to get settled. Who’s coolest? Who’s hardest? Who’s brainiest? Normal boys care about this stuff.”

— David Mitchell

435. “The nineteenth-century ship is indeed restored beautifully. Despite their mission, Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking. “What’s wrong?” whispers Napier. What is wrong? Luisa’s birthmark throbs. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and the future. “Nothing.”

— David Mitchell

436. “I rarely feel despair, I forget how it gouges.”

— David Mitchell

437. “Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an’ a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.”

— David Mitchell

438. “If I could express exactly what was most annoying, ungrateful and unreasonable about my own behaviour before the person I’d angered, then the situation would be defused. You can’t have an argument with someone who’s saying exactly what you’re thinking.”

— David Mitchell

439. “Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.”

— David Mitchell

440. “Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.”

— David Mitchell

441. “Faust tends not to have happy endings.”

— David Mitchell

442. “The only explanation is that my senses, memory, and mind are conspiring against my well-being, and nothing’s scarier than that.”

— David Mitchell

443. “Every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time.”

— David Mitchell

444. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.”

— David Mitchell

445. “That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no unembarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.”

— David Mitchell

446. “Are you what you believe yourself to be?”

— David Mitchell

447. “Oh, why don’t you just write him into the will as well, Mama? Why not give him half the estate?” She got down from the table without being excused. Ayrs croaked, “First good idea the girl’s had in seventeen years!” loud enough for her to hear. “At least Frobisher earns his damn keep!”

— David Mitchell

448. “He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.”

— David Mitchell

449. “To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.”

— David Mitchell

450. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell