David Mitchell famous quotes

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
-- David Mitchell

#Inspirational #Funny #Inspiring

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Kindness #Past #Birth

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

#Inspirational #Real #Book

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.
-- David Mitchell

#Humanity #States #Organized

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

#Inspirational #Believe #Waiting

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

#Love #Book #Half

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Healing #Mean #Resilience

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Writing #Mean #People

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

#Inspiring #Ocean #Limitless

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
-- David Mitchell

#Hands #People #Unlimited

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

#Writing #Winter #Would Be

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

#Language #Prison #Foreign Language

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
-- David Mitchell

#Arrogance #Modesty

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
-- David Mitchell

#Ocean #Multitudes

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

#Past #Speed #Disappear

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

#Girl #Cat #Earth

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

#Kindness #Birth #Crime

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

#Summer #Goodbye #Autumn

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Earth #Clubs #Doorways

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance
-- David Mitchell

#True Knowledge

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

#Fireworks

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.
-- David Mitchell

#People #Becoming #Obscenity

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.
-- David Mitchell

#Book #Challenges

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
-- David Mitchell

#Literature #Bigs #Behemoth

...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

#Missing Someone #House #Coats

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Clouds #Fog #Wind

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

#Historical #Revolution #Fantasy

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.
-- David Mitchell

#Truth #Reality #Truth Is

Trees're always a relief, after people.
-- David Mitchell

#People #Tree #Relief

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

#Soul #Selfishness #Extinction

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’.
-- David Mitchell

#Powerful #Lying #Giving

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

#Victory #Ordinary #Accepted

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

#Mother #Book #Used

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Clouds #Giving #Atlas

Power. What do we mean? 'The ability to determine another man's luck.' ...how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. First: God-given gifts of charisma. Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity's topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower -- for want of discipline. Third: the will to power.
-- David Mitchell

#Flower #Mean #Men

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.
-- David Mitchell

#World #Want #Strikes

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
-- David Mitchell

#Dream #Night #Day And Night

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.
-- David Mitchell

#Two #Firsts #Steps

Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.
-- David Mitchell

#Firsts #Easy #Young

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

#Appreciate #Enough #Source

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

#War #Law #Kitchen

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.
-- David Mitchell

#Fall #People #Balance

...A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty...
-- David Mitchell

#Mountain

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.
-- David Mitchell

#Eye #Her Eyes #Through My Eyes

…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.
-- David Mitchell

#Ocean #Blue #Sky

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?
-- David Mitchell

#Teacher #Jobs #Hate

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

#Lying #World #May

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

#Biblical #Civilization #Miracle

The weak are meat the strong do eat.
-- David Mitchell

#Strong #Meat #Weak

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid
-- David Mitchell

#Men #Aids #Mutual

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

#Cheating #Hurt #Pits

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.
-- David Mitchell

#Roaches #Soulless

The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.
-- David Mitchell

#Smart #Mind #Lows

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.
-- David Mitchell

#Emergencies

If your words're true, they're armed.
-- David Mitchell

There are so many cities in every single city.
-- David Mitchell

#Cities

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
-- David Mitchell

#Mother #Real #Book

If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.
-- David Mitchell

#Mean #Adversity #Purpose

Do ants get headaches?
-- David Mitchell

#Ants #Headache

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

#Book #Reading #Fate

... 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

#Powerful #Fear #Ignorance

Music’s a wood you walk through.
-- David Mitchell

#Woods #Walks

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Boys #Men #Thinking

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

#One Day #Shows

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

#Heart #Mind #Body

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

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.
-- David Mitchell

#Eggs #Bad Mood #Bricks

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Waiting #Sound #May

I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
-- David Mitchell

#People #Lists

It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace." "It doesn't feel very all right." "That's because it's not the end.
-- David Mitchell

#Jace #Ends #Feels

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction
-- David Mitchell

#Fiction

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.
-- David Mitchell

#Forgive Me #Forgiving #Flaunting

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
-- David Mitchell

#Feet #Tree #Soil

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.
-- David Mitchell

#Memories

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

#Answers #Demand

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

#Civilization #Jingles #Stuff

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

#Liars #Games #Cards

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

#Lying #Thinking #Worry

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Powerful #Reading #Impact

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Men #Long #People

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

#Track #Figures #Crosses

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Kindness #Eye #Past

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.
-- David Mitchell

#Believe #Doors #Waiting

Time is the speed at which the past decays.
-- David Mitchell

#Past #Decay #Speed

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

#Views #Universe

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.
-- David Mitchell

#Flesh #Spirit #Weak

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

#Said

clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.
-- David Mitchell

#Clock #Disagreement

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

#Past

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

#Reading #Blind #Novel

Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.
-- David Mitchell

#Mirages #Salvation #Credibility

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime
-- David Mitchell

#Humanity #World #End Of The World

I pass through many Me's in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.
-- David Mitchell

#Selfish #Lying #Bed

How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!
-- David Mitchell

#Failing

Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
-- David Mitchell

#Kings #Thinking #Spheres

Reality is the page. Life is the word.
-- David Mitchell

#Reality #Pages #Life Is

It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.
-- David Mitchell

#World #Small World

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.
-- David Mitchell

#Broken #Healthy

Assured her I’ve never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now,
-- David Mitchell

#Intention #Starting

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

#War #Years #Remission