David Mitchell > Quotes

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― 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

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.”
― David Mitchell, number9dream

“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Trees're always a relief, after people.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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

“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

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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

“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.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all. ”
― 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

“over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.”
― David Mitchell, number9dream

“We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.”
― David Mitchell, number9dream

“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 Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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

“Soul is a verb.”
― David Mitchell

“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.”
― David Mitchell

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“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.”
― David Mitchell, number9dream

“History admits no rules; only outcomes.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.”
― 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

“I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

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

“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

“So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.”
― David Mitchell

“Behold your future, Cavendish the Younger. You will not apply for membership, but the tribe of the elderly will claim you. Your present will not keep pace with the world's. This slippage will stretch your skin, sag your skeleton, erode your hair and memory, make your skin turn opaque so your twitching organs and blue-cheese veins will be semivisible. You will venture out only in daylight, avoiding weekends and school holidays. Language, too, will leave you behind, betraying your tribal affiliations whenever you speak. On escalators, on trunk roads, in supermarket aisles, the living will overtake you, incessantly. Elegant women will not see you. Store detectives will not see you. Salespeople will not see you, unless they sell stair lifts or fraudulent insurance policies. Only babies, cats, and drug addicts will acknowledge your existence. So do not fritter away your days. Sooner than you fear, you will stand before a mirror in a care home, look at your body, and think, E.T., locked in a ruddy cupboard for a fortnight.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality”
― David Mitchell, number9dream

“Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.”
― David Mitchell

“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.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“& 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?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas