David Mitchell Quotes

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
David Mitchell
Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.
David Mitchell
Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay.
David Mitchell
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
David Mitchell
Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.
David Mitchell
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.
David Mitchell
She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
David Mitchell
He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.
David Mitchell
I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe in.
David Mitchell
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.
David Mitchell
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
David Mitchell
Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?...Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s her name?
David Mitchell
If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.
David Mitchell
Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.
David Mitchell
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.
David Mitchell
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.
David Mitchell
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
David Mitchell
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.
David Mitchell
Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell
Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.
David Mitchell
Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.
David Mitchell
Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.
David Mitchell
Coffee’s the elixir of life.
David Mitchell
They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge).
David Mitchell
The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it.
David Mitchell
Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.
David Mitchell
it’s like the British in Ireland in 1916’ , says Oisir O’Dowd. ‘The repeated the ageless macho mantra, “Force is the only thing these natives understand,” so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed.
David Mitchell
Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.
David Mitchell
Think larger. Redraw what is possible.
David Mitchell
At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.
David Mitchell
I asked, how is knowledge found? 'You must learn how to read, little sister,' he said.
David Mitchell
All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
David Mitchell
Loyalty looks simple... but it ain't.
David Mitchell
I find a certain comfort," confesses Marinus, "in humanity's helplessness.
David Mitchell
...I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don't tell *me* about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the rednecks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes that they are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell 'em their imperial slaves' rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium's! Oh, you'll grow hoarse, poor & gray in caucuses! You'll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay along with him! & 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?
David Mitchell
After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.
David Mitchell
Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.
David Mitchell
Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.
David Mitchell
Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.
David Mitchell
Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.
David Mitchell
Fire’s the sun, unwindin’ itself out o’ the wood.
David Mitchell
One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars.
David Mitchell
On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?
David Mitchell
...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.
David Mitchell
Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it's a scientific fact that virgins can't get pregnant. Stella told me.
David Mitchell
This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.
David Mitchell
The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.There are always more.
David Mitchell
Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don't fit in.
David Mitchell
Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?
David Mitchell
A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.
David Mitchell
... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.
David Mitchell
Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren't sacred beings crafted in the Almighty's image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit." He mimicked my usual voice, very well. "'But why *me*, Henry, are we not friends?' Well, Adam, even friends are made out of meat.
David Mitchell
A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.
David Mitchell
Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.
David Mitchell
But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
David Mitchell
Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.
David Mitchell
Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.
David Mitchell
The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.
David Mitchell
This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.
David Mitchell
& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.
David Mitchell