David Mitchell Quotes - Page 2

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?
David Mitchell
Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' q
David Mitchell
Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws?
David Mitchell
I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.
David Mitchell
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
David Mitchell
Survival often demands our courage.
David Mitchell
I watched the stars and thought of other lives.
David Mitchell
What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.
David Mitchell
Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?
David Mitchell
But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block...
David Mitchell
Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.
David Mitchell
Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking ... vampires?”Arkady groans. “On, the V-word! Here it comes again.
David Mitchell
You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.
David Mitchell
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.
David Mitchell
A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.
David Mitchell
Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.
David Mitchell
Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm.""You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?
David Mitchell
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
David Mitchell
When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
David Mitchell
Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
David Mitchell
But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.
David Mitchell
Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.
David Mitchell
When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.
David Mitchell
You only value something if you know it’ll end.
David Mitchell
Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
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
Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.
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
Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.
David Mitchell
The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.
David Mitchell
... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.
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
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction
David Mitchell
Nothing has changed, except everything.
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
...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.
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
Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.
David Mitchell
Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.
David Mitchell
London is a language. I guess all places are.
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
Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.
David Mitchell
It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.
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
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
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
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
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
I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
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
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
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
…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats.
David Mitchell
There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
David Mitchell
When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost
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
...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 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
This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.
David Mitchell