David Mitchell Quotes - Page 4

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

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.

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

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

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’.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

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

... 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.

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