David Mitchell Quotes

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

~ David Mitchell

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

~ David Mitchell

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

~ 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 west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

~ David Mitchell

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

~ David Mitchell

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

~ David Mitchell

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who weimagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.

~ David Mitchell

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.

~ David Mitchell

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

~ David Mitchell

The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!.

~ David Mitchell

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

~ David Mitchell

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

~ David Mitchell

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.

~ 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

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

~ David Mitchell

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.

~ David Mitchell

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. 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

I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...

~ David Mitchell

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

~ David Mitchell

People pontificate, Suicide is selfishness. Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

~ 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

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

~ David Mitchell

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

~ 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

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

~ David Mitchell

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

~ David Mitchell

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

~ David Mitchell

What's the book like?Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!

~ David Mitchell

Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong. I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

~ David Mitchell

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

~ David Mitchell

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

~ David Mitchell

.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.

~ David Mitchell

Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?

~ David Mitchell

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

~ David Mitchell

Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with!

~ David Mitchell

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!

~ David Mitchell

Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all

~ David Mitchell

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

~ David Mitchell

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror.I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, History suggests, not until they are made to.

~ David Mitchell

The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.

~ David Mitchell