Top 273 Quotes & Sayings by David Mitchell - Page 5

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!

Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.

Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

I feel like something important has happened to me. Is this possible?

It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.

I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

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?

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.

Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.

A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.

I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference 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?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror

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 were ample explanation.

What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars.

One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.

Assured her I've never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now.

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.

The best way to get out of debt is not to seek to get out of debt, but to seek to create wealth

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.

Time is the speed at which the past decays.

Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.