Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by David Mitchell - Page 3

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.

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.

...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.

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

If your words're true, they're armed.

Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report's criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I'd remember every word.

Trees're always a relief, after people.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

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 were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

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.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

The learnin' mind is the livin' mind, Meronym said, an any sort o'Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new high Smart or low.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

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 ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.

Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do.

I hear my father-in-law's response..."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 it 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?

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

... 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.

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?