Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

— David Mitchell

402. “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

403. “I und’standed why Meronym’d not said the hole true ’bout Prescience Isle an’ her tribe too. People b’lief the world is built so an’ tellin ’em it ain’t so caves the roofs on their heads’n’maybe yours. Old.”

— David Mitchell

404. “A hairy beggar kneeling by a puddle of vomit turns out to be a dog.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

406. “At your age – says Mr. Hughees -, you think getting old and dying’s what other people do. At my age, you think, Where did it all go? If you want to do something, do it. ‘Cause your turn to be in that box, it’s coming. No doctor, no diet, no nothing’ll keep it away. It’ll be here. Quick as – she snaps her fingers and Elf blinks – that.”

— David Mitchell

407. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

409. “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

410. “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

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

— David Mitchell

412. “Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted.”

— David Mitchell

413. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

416. “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

417. “Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love- or rather our rapacity-for treasure, gold, spices, and dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal of divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my maker cast me on the winning side.”

— David Mitchell

418. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

419. “Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?”

— David Mitchell

420. “She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.” I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.”

— David Mitchell

421. “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

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

— David Mitchell

423. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

427. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

428. “For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.”

— David Mitchell

429. “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

430. “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

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

— David Mitchell

432. “Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

433. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

435. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

437. “The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns.”

— David Mitchell

438. “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

439. “Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don’t have to watch them widening.”

— David Mitchell

440. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!”

— David Mitchell

441. “A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

446. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

449. “His skin’s so tanned he could be Turkish or something.”

— David Mitchell

450. “The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds; the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.”

— David Mitchell