David Mitchell Quotes: 22

• My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

  Cloud Atlas

• A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

  Cloud Atlas

• Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

  Cloud Atlas

• Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

  Cloud Atlas

• I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

  Cloud Atlas

• Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

  Cloud Atlas

• 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.

  Cloud Atlas

• ...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

  Cloud Atlas

• 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’.

  Black Swan Green

• The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.

• The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

  Cloud Atlas

• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

• Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

  Cloud Atlas

• Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.

  number9dream

• Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

  Ghostwritten

• Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

  Cloud Atlas

• Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.

  Cloud Atlas

• The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.

  Cloud Atlas

• The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!.

• Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

  Slade House

• The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

  number9dream

• there're times when i suspect that 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

  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet