David Mitchell

.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

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.

What's the book like?""Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!

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

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who weimagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.

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

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

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you wan

Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level.

A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.