David Mitchell
I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.Collection: Funny
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’.Collection: Powerful
This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.Collection: Baby
Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Night
How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!Collection: Failing
We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.Collection: Lasts
What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?Collection: Ocean
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Fog
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.Collection: People
If swans weren't real myths'd make up.Collection: Real
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.Collection: Bunnies
The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.Collection: Broken
Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originalityCollection: Humanity
Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.Collection: Firsts
...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Appreciate
The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.Collection: Eye
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking for the door.Collection: Reading
War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it’s a lottery.Collection: Country
The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.Collection: Stories
If war’s first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.Collection: Firsts
It’s true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.Collection: Reading