David Mitchell Quotes
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.
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.
Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.
If I want to act relaxed, it's going to take all my cunning, skill, and concentration.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.
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.
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.
Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
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.
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.
But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.
So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .
I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
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.
A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.
. . .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.
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
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.
Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.
