Quotes by David Mitchell

I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.

Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws?

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. Oy! yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. Theres a fackin q

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying races agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.

Answering the question How would you like to smell? by saying Id rather I didnt is also no longer acceptable. Its not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - its seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.

But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.

Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people arent sacred beings crafted in the Almightys image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit. He mimicked my usual voice, very well. But why *me*, Henry, are we not friends? Well, Adam, even friends are made out of meat.

... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?

Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you dont fit in.

The worlds a headmaster who works on your faults. I dont mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how youll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything thats wrong with us, if were too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, thats 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 isnt such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.There are always more.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. 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.

Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and its a scientific fact that virgins cant get pregnant. Stella told me.