David Mitchell
I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.Collection: Past
Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.Collection: Sex
These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Past
But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.Collection: Track
Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.Collection: Eggs
Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.Collection: Eloquent
Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.Collection: Nice
If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.Collection: War
Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.Collection: Beloved
Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.Collection: Civilization
This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.Collection: Thinking
Trees're always a relief, after people.Collection: People
What sparks wars? 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. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. 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 it be.Collection: War
The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.Collection: Humanity
The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.Collection: Patterns
Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.Collection: One Day
By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.Collection: Kindness
Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?Collection: Love
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.Collection: Life
Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?Collection: Country
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.Collection: Stars
Reality is the page. Life is the word.Collection: Reality
The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.Collection: Past
Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?Collection: Answers
Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.Collection: Roaches
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.Collection: Sky
History admits no rules; only outcomes.Collection: Outcomes
I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.Collection: Inspirational
...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.Collection: Missing Someone
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?Collection: Real
The body is the outermost layer of the mind.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Clouds
One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.Collection: World
Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.Collection: Nintendo
If your words're true, they're armed.Collection: Ifs
…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.Collection: Ocean
But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.Collection: Book
. . .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.Collection: Dream
Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?Collection: Teacher
I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.Collection: Biblical
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.Collection: Suicide
Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.Collection: Fighting
One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.Collection: Men
We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.Collection: Knows
The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?Collection: World
Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.Collection: Complaining
Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.Collection: Stuff
An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.Collection: Different