31 David Mitchell Quotes

David Mitchell quotes

1. Ghostwritten's secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, 'Why do things happen?' so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams's secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, 'In what space does the mind operate?'

2. 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.

3. I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.

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

5. Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

6. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

7. The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

8. Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.

9. 'Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.' (An Orison of Somni ~451, p.237)

10. 'Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds and made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts of humans, yay, a hunger for more: Human hunger birthed the Civilise, but human hunger killed it too.' ? (p.287)

11. 'Another war is always coming: They are never properly extinguished. What sparks war? 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: 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 be.' ?(p.462)

12. 'Diplomacy: it mops up war's spillages; legitimises its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.' ? (p.462)

13. 'Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation, and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.' ?

14. 'History has no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.' ?( p.528)

15. 'One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself: In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.' ? (p.528)

16. 'If we believe that humanity can transcend tooth and claw, if we believe that divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. // 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:' (p.528)

17. 'I hear my father-in-law's response: 'Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!' Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?' (p.529-- final passage)

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

2. 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.

3. Your environment affects you wherever you are.

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

5. So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

6. 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.

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

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

9. If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

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

11. 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?

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

13. There are so many cities in every single city.

14. Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.