David Mitchell Quotes

Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metap...

Eva is guarded in a schoolroom down on Earth, chewing her pencil, dreaming of being with me, I know it, me, looking down from amongst exfoliation apostles, dreaming of being with her.

For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that the natural order of things is entirely man-made, and that a world that...

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own p...

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...

Only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there's some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information...

Facet of existence that only a few hundred in history have glimpsed, but so what? I could hardly tell

I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

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

I wonder if Anchorite means anchorman, or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club–ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.

I'm shoutin' back more'n forty long years at myself, yay,...Oy, list'n! Times are you're weak 'gainst the world! Times are you can't do nothin'! That ain't your fault, it's this busted world's fault i...

When watching the news, it’s so easy to forget what most of us are like: pleasant, polite, socially shy. We don’t want rows, we want a quiet life. We feel inadequate because we don’t protest and argue...

Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wide-worlders in transit, all those misplaced, t...

No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.

Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit—it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless. Careerless!

Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of . . . gay.' 'Gay? A merry activity?' This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is . . . what creeps and p...

Power. What do we mean? 'The ability to determine another man's luck.' ...how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer i...

Sixsmith,Eva. Because her name is a synonym for temptation: what treads nearer to the core of man? Because her soul swims in her eyes. Because I dream of creeping through the velvet folds to her room,...