David Mitchell Quotes

120 Sourced Quotes

A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty...

David Mitchell
If only,' Shiroyama dreams, 'human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

David Mitchell
Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

David Mitchell
I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.

David Mitchell
Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?

David Mitchell
Ghostwritten's secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams's secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?"

David Mitchell
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

David Mitchell
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

David Mitchell
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

David Mitchell
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

David Mitchell
To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

David Mitchell
What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

David Mitchell
Diplomacy… mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

David Mitchell
Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.

David Mitchell
Often I think boys don't become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man's mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.

David Mitchell
Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

David Mitchell
Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

David Mitchell
As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

David Mitchell
A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

David Mitchell
Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.

David Mitchell
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

David Mitchell
But ain't dyin' terrorsome cold if there ain't nothin' after?
Yay—she sort o' laughed but not smilin', nay—our truth is terrorsome cold.

David Mitchell
Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

David Mitchell
But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

David Mitchell
If you're in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you're reading, it's fate all the way.

David Mitchell
The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will.

David Mitchell
"But it's been done a hundred times before!" — As if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!

David Mitchell
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

David Mitchell
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.

David Mitchell
The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

David Mitchell