David Mitchell Quotes

Prejudice is permafrost

I have no earliest memories, Archivist. Every day of my life in Papa Song was as uniform as the fries we vended.

When people listen they make a listening noise.

Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true? said I. Yay, an’ it usually is, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, an’ that’s why true true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds.

This world spins from the same unseen forces that twist our hearts.

If an atrocity isn't written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That's what I can't stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it's made a tiny d...

If you’ve not been through it, you can’t understand, not really. Lucky you, I say. Control is about fear, see. If you’re afraid enough of the reprisals, you don’t say no, you don’t fight back, you don...

The newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterp...

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is this the doom written within our nature? If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, i...

Книга, которую вы читаете, уже не та, которой она была до того, как вы начали ее читать.

It is a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only...

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

Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-bl...

Marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don't be alarmed, and don't resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it's the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter mo...

When you die, your soul crosses the Dusk between life and the Blank Sea. The journey takes forty-nine days,

We din't speak much from then 'cos speakin' can be heard by spyers what you can't spy.

What is it that ties shapes of land to the human heart, Mo?

Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit—it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless.

When I was a young man, and the Russkies were going to blow us all to Kingdom Come, we were told we’d have a four-minute warning. I’m talking Ford, Carter, Reagan Days. Four minutes, I used to wonder...

On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket - and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in lo...