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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6773255 | Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines. | poetry | David Mitchell | |
| 372e437 | I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to makes .. | David Mitchell | ||
| 0cefdf1 | Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well." Pens scratch. "Oh, and beware of the verb 'seem'; it's a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better." | David Mitchell | ||
| e902107 | 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 | ||
| 2f8284b | 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, Cortes'll lay Tenochtitlan to waste again, and later...the sun'll grow cold again. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities. | David Mitchell | ||
| 60bf912 | Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa's forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. "What?" | identity daughter growing-up parents mother father human-nature roles | David Mitchell | |
| dc6e71e | Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents." | war | David Mitchell | |
| bb05275 | Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick. -Robert Frobisher | style-consultants | David Mitchell | |
| c1ea310 | Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator... | David Mitchell | ||
| 8c7256f | The heating systems composed works in the style of John Cage. | music humor | David Mitchell | |
| 5d81433 | If only human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders. | David Mitchell | ||
| ef5db3b | Mrs.Comb tightened her headscarf and wondered why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most. She could not understand it. She could not begin to understand. | David Mitchell | ||
| 96b99c0 | He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune. | David Mitchell | ||
| e49dee0 | I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans. | dreams computers technology | David Mitchell | |
| 0767213 | Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine. | David Mitchell | ||
| 656c934 | Todas las fronteras son convenciones, hasta las nacionales. Y todas se pueden rebasar, pero primero hay que concebir esa posibilidad. | David Mitchell | ||
| df4e433 | The first of 'Goose's Two Laws of Survival.' It runs thus, 'The weak are meat the strong do eat.' " ... Henry grinned in the dark & cleared his throat. "The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That's it." | humorous life | David Mitchell | |
| 6e0eedb | Love is a big knot of whys. | David Mitchell | ||
| 784537f | Well, you seem to have embraced Union propaganda wholeheartedly, Sonmi-451. And I might observe that you have embraced corpocracy propaganda wholeheartedly, Archivist. | David Mitchell | ||
| 1eb6ec7 | I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes. | thriller movies horror | David Mitchell | |
| ef4908f | A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden. | nature | David Mitchell | |
| debbebe | Because a man like me has no business with this substance "beauty," yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart." | David Mitchell | ||
| a1f8408 | Nothing often poses in men as wisdom. | David Mitchell | ||
| 9a9fcbb | My voice was jus' a duck fart in a hurrycane. | David Mitchell | ||
| dc8ae39 | Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet. | love longing | David Mitchell | |
| fa608ee | A society where you're not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that's being ushered in. | David Mitchell | ||
| a78884f | Let me write about an Icelandic road trip; a running man; backflashes galore; and slowly disclose what it is he's running from. Bring him to Asbyrgi; mention how the ravine was formed by a slammed-down hoof of Odin's horse. Mention how it's the Parliament of the Hidden Folk. Have him stare at the rock faces until the rock's faces stare back. Breathe deep the resinous tang of the spruces. Let him meet a ghost from his past. Hear the bird, lu.. | David Mitchell | ||
| 88f627f | Oh, aging is ruddy unbearable! The I's we were yearn to breathe the world's air again, but can they ever break out from these calcified cocoons? | David Mitchell | ||
| d80a57a | Old Rekohu's claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori's priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man's blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cap.. | war peace utopia | David Mitchell | |
| 2c12226 | True, I only properly started talking with Todd half an hour ago, but every instance of undying love was only half an hour young, once upon a time. | David Mitchell | ||
| 8c3108a | I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere. | slavery ocean | David Mitchell | |
| 2d0e5a1 | One can spot a fellow musician in any context, even amongst policemen. The craziest-eyed, unruliest-haired one, either hungry-skinny or jovial-portly. | David Mitchell | ||
| abb83ed | If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it's Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aboriginal art were eroding away my will to live. It's as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald. | australia rottnest-island | David Mitchell | |
| 939d809 | After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X. | David Mitchell | ||
| 785f61a | But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block... | David Mitchell | ||
| f86573f | Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." -Autua" | David Mitchell | ||
| 78cf0ea | where there's Hilo, oh, there's blissweed. | David Mitchell | ||
| a9828a4 | Cruelty has never made me smile. | David Mitchell | ||
| b11beef | Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. | David Mitchell | ||
| 196e8a7 | She has four sons," Nurse Purvis leads me on, "all with a London post code, but they never visit. You'd think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we're all heading to." I consider airing my theory that our culture's coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to u.. | David Mitchell | ||
| 986795e | If poor doomed Olly's a Radio 4 play, what am I?"" "You, Hugo," she kisses my earlobe, "are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you'd stumble across on TV at night. You know you'll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway." | low-budget radio-4 tv movie | David Mitchell | |
| e0b4aca | There is no God but the one we dream up. | David Mitchell | ||
| aaa2271 | Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling. | sheep | David Mitchell | |
| 2775e2f | Are you mad? Always a trickier question than it looks. | David Mitchell |