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

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

— David Mitchell

403. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— David Mitchell

412. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

415. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— 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. “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

421. “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

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

— David Mitchell

423. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

426. “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

427. “Beauty is immune to definition.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— David Mitchell

436. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

438. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

443. “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

444. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

447. “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

448. “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

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

— David Mitchell

450. “Only the inanimate can be so alive.”

— David Mitchell