Quotes by David Mitchell

Pretending”, she looked at the garden, is not the truth.But you said two true things, right ? One, you hate this girl. Two, you want her to feel better. If you decide that the wanting truths more important than the hating truth, just tell her youve forgiven her, even if you havent. At least shed feel better. Maybe thatd make you feel better too.Madame Crommelynck studied her hands, moodily, both sides. Sophistry, she pronounced. Im not sure what sophistry means so I kept shtum.

Id love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. Id love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry Id be one day to look inside it.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

Its a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind.

This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: its the study of historians studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

...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.

The truth is #9dream is a descendant of Norwegian Wood. Both are ghost stories. She in Norwegian Wood curses you with loneliness. The Two spirits dancing so strange in #9dream bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony.

When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost

Theres no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.

I recalled my father-in-laws aphorism To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom... & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.

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.

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.

Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

I added writers to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands? I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror. I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Melphi relplied, History suggests, not until they are made to.

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, thats... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. Well dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.

In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitts sonsd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, youve got three sons, by Friday youve got none. Lady Albertina had just, yknow, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.