Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

408. “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

409. “Sawing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy when you are eleven years old.”

— David Mitchell

410. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

415. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences.”

— David Mitchell

422. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

423. “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

424. “No one’s ever very sure if doves and pigeons are the same bird or not.”

— David Mitchell

425. “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

426. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

429. “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

430. “Grief’s a bastard, it really is – pardon my French. It makes everything else harder.”

— David Mitchell

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— David Mitchell

435. “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

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

— David Mitchell

437. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

440. “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

441. “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

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

— David Mitchell

443. “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

444. “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

445. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

449. “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

450. “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