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

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

— David Mitchell

403. “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

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

— David Mitchell

405. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

407. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

408. “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

409. “Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

418. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. 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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

426. “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

427. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

431. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

432. “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

433. “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

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

— David Mitchell

435. “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

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

— David Mitchell

437. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

443. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

446. “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

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

— David Mitchell

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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