David mitchell quotes

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Reality is the page. Life is the word.

Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.

I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

I think we think in terms of stories.

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

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.

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

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

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

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

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

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

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’.

Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

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.

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.

... 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.

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

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

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

There are so many cities in every single city.

...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.

why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious 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.

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

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

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.

Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

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

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. - Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

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

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.

Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

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.

I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.

'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

If I want to act relaxed, it's going to take all my cunning, skill, and concentration.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

Trees're always a relief, after people.

You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

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?

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

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.

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.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?

But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

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

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

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.

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.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.

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

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

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

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 metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It’s simply part of being human.

The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

...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.

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it

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

Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

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.

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