Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— David Mitchell

406. “The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

411. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— David Mitchell

416. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

417. “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

418. “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

419. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— David Mitchell

425. “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

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

— David Mitchell

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

— David Mitchell

431. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

434. “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

435. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

438. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

449. “You only value something if you know it’ll end.”

— David Mitchell

450. “Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time.”

— David Mitchell