“ People’re a nestful of needs. Dull needs, sharp needs, bottomless-pit needs, flash-in-the-pan needs, needs for things you can’t hold, needs for things you can. 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 we… David Mitchell
“ Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. David Mitchell
“ Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. David Mitchell
“ Other boys mean questions have to get settled. Who’s coolest? Who’s hardest? Who’s brainiest? Normal boys care about this stuff David Mitchell
“ Orito pictures the human mind that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception. David Mitchell
“ One moment you're carrying this loveable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she's off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on… David Mitchell
“ My friend is composing an epic in Byronic stanzas entitled True History of Autua, Last Moriori & interrupts my journal writing to ask what rhymes with what: - Streams of blood? Themes of mud? Robin Ho… David Mitchell
“ If only human beings were notmasks behind masks behind masks.If only this world wasa clean board of lines and intersections.If only time wasa sequence of considered movesand not a chaos of slippages a… 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
“ I have no earliest memories, Archivist. Every day of my life in Papa Song was as uniform as the fries we vended. David Mitchell
“ Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is. David Mitchell
“ Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it.… David Mitchell
“ Embrace your enemy, the elders urged, to prevent him striking you. (Embrace your enemy, Henry quipped, to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.) David Mitchell
