David Mitchell Quotes

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

~ David Mitchell

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

~ David Mitchell

Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.

~ David Mitchell

Pretending”,' she looked at the garden, 'is not the truth.''But you said two true things, right ? One, you hate this girl. Two, you want her to feel better. If you decide that the wanting truth's more important than the hating truth, just tell her you've forgiven her, even if you haven't. At least she'd feel better. Maybe that'd make you feel better too.'Madame Crommelynck studied her hands, moodily, both sides. 'Sophistry', she pronounced. I'm not sure what 'sophistry' means so I kept shtum.

~ David Mitchell

I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.

~ David Mitchell

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

~ David Mitchell

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

~ David Mitchell

This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.

~ David Mitchell

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

~ David Mitchell

...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.

~ David Mitchell

The truth is #9dream is a descendant of Norwegian Wood. Both are ghost stories. She in Norwegian Wood curses you with loneliness. The Two spirits dancing so strange in #9dream bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony.

~ David Mitchell

When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost

~ David Mitchell

There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.

~ David Mitchell

I recalled my father-in-law's aphorism To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom... & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.

~ David Mitchell

The first of ‘Goose’s Two Laws of Survival.’ It runs thus, ‘The weak are meat the strong do eat.’ ” ... Henry grinned in the dark & cleared his throat. “The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That’s it.

~ David Mitchell

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

Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

~ David Mitchell

I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

~ 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

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands? I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror. I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, History suggests, not until they are made to.

~ David Mitchell

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.

~ David Mitchell

In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.

~ 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

Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.

~ David Mitchell

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

~ David Mitchell

London is a language. I guess all places are.

~ David Mitchell

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

~ David Mitchell

Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.

~ David Mitchell

Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

~ David Mitchell

...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.

~ David Mitchell

The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed … … and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face.Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open.

~ David Mitchell

Nothing has changed, except everything.

~ David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

~ David Mitchell

What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes? Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. 'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.

~ David Mitchell

The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

~ David Mitchell

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

~ David Mitchell

Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. Watched you for as long as I dared. I don’t believe it was a fluke that I saw you first. I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world, and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed.Yours eternally, R.F.

~ David Mitchell

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

~ David Mitchell

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.

~ David Mitchell

Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

~ David Mitchell