David Mitchell Quotes

209 quotes in 2303 categories

• War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.
• So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.
• 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…
• Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.
• As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
• 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…
• 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…
• People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin'em it ain't so caves the roof on their heads 'n'maybe yours.
• But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.
• War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.
• The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.
• 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,…
• I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.
• 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,…
• Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
• Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

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