Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— David Mitchell

402. “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

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

— David Mitchell

404. “Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

408. “Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.”

— David Mitchell

409. “Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

411. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

412. “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

413. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose.”

— David Mitchell

414. “The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.”

— David Mitchell

415. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

418. “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

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

— David Mitchell

420. “I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.”

— David Mitchell

421. “Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

423. “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

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

— David Mitchell

425. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

427. “I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.”

— David Mitchell

428. “February’s so gloomy in this part of the world”, said Mrs. de Roo, “don’t you think? It’s not so much a month as a twenty-eight day long Monday morning.”

— David Mitchell

429. “You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap – I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in – but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.”

— David Mitchell

430. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

431. “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

432. “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

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

— David Mitchell

434. “We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

— David Mitchell

435. “Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

437. “Aroma of fresh bread led me to a bakery where a deformed woman with no nose sold me a dozen crescent-moon pastries. Only wanted one, but thought she had enough problems.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

440. “The blue jay threads a flight-path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark.”

— David Mitchell

441. “All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

— 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. “If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.”

— David Mitchell

444. “Nurse Noakes passed by and my fellow inmates all silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.”

— David Mitchell

445. “Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

448. “Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell