David Mitchell Quotes

120 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

David Mitchell
Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

David Mitchell
Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator...

David Mitchell
Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

David Mitchell
I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

David Mitchell
Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.

David Mitchell
But it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

David Mitchell
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you're afraid of them.

David Mitchell
Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

David Mitchell
Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

David Mitchell
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

David Mitchell
One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.

David Mitchell
Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

David Mitchell
The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

David Mitchell
If losers can xploit [sic] what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long time.

David Mitchell
Books don't offer real escape but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

David Mitchell
We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk to slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs 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
Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.

David Mitchell
An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

David Mitchell
Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?

David Mitchell