quotes by David Mitchell

""A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

ugh, i'm not sure if this makes me feel guilty for all the books i've never finished or hopeful. "
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"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 (Cloud Atlas)

"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 (Black Swan Green: A Novel)

"We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk."
— David Mitchell (Number 9 Dream)

"Trees're always a relief, after people."
— David Mitchell (Black Swan Green: A Novel)

"Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core."
— David Mitchell

"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 (Cloud Atlas)

"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot."
— David Mitchell (Number 9 Dream)

"These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all. "
— David Mitchell

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

Zachry"
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Who was blowing on the nape of my neck."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."
— David Mitchell

"The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense? "
— David Mitchell (Black Swan Green: A Novel)

"Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go."
— David Mitchell

"Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
(Number 9 Dream)"
— David Mitchell

"Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, and atlas of clouds."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right."
— David Mitchell

"All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities"
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality"
— David Mitchell (Number 9 Dream)

"My friend is composing an epic in Byronic stanzas entitled "True History of Autua, Last Moriori" & interrupts my journal writing to ask what rhymes with what: - "Streams of blood"? "Themes of mud"? "Robin Hood"?"
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.""
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"History admits no rules; only outcomes."
— David Mitchell

"After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, no the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"History admits no rules; only outcomes."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Just as I was flung over the threshold, I embraced Grigoire the Swiss Fiancé in a rugger grip, determined that smug cockatoo was coming with me...Stone steps and icy pavements bruised my own flesh as black as his, banged my elbows and hips just as hard, but at least mine was not the only ruined evening in Bruges, and I yelled, kicking his ribs once for each word, before half-running, half-hobbling off on my whacked ankle, 'Love hurts!'
"
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.
There are always more."
— David Mitchell

"Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace."
— David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)

"Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo."
— David Mitchell

"History admits no rules only outcomes."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"History admits no rules;only outcomes."
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

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