David Mitchell

“Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?”

“I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.”

“A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat.”

“The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.”

“Dogs hate foxes. Nazis hate Jews. Hate doesn’t need a why. Who or even what is ample.”

“After the nuclear war, kids like them’ll rule what’s left. It’ll be hell.”

“Do spirals end? Or just get so tiny your eyes can’t follow any more?”

“Music’s a wood you walk through.”

“The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it.”

“Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.”

“Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.”

“I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.”

“Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.”

“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.”

“Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.”

“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”

“The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;”

“Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do.”

“The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.”

“why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most”

“Reality is the page. Life is the word.”

“10 ноября 1944 г.Дела обстоят слишком скверно, чтобы нам позволялось выходить на мостик. Абэ напоминает, что мы – незаменимые детали своих кайтэн. «1-333» слишком качает, чтобы мы могли проверять их исправность. Мы чувствуем определенную сдержанность в отношении к нам команды «1-333». Некоторая дистанция, наверное, естественна, но иногда их поведение граничит с холодностью. Например, из разговоров я узнал, что радист первого класса Хосокава вырос в Нагасаки, и, когда мы вышли в коридор после ужина, обратился к нему на нашем местном диалекте. Он вздрогнул и ответил мне официальным тоном. Когда Абэ предложил, чтобы пилоты кайтэн помогали с уборкой, капитан Ёкота коротко ответил, что наше предложение великодушно, но об этом не может быть и речи. Абэ считает, что эти люди смотрят на нас как на своего рода богов и просто не умеют выразить благоговение. Гото заметил, что три с половиной года постоянных погружений не могли не сказаться на их душевном здоровье. Кусакабэ предположил, что они считают сумасшедшими нас. Это разозлило Абэ. Кусакабэ спокойно сказал, что жить на подводной лодке – значит постоянно ускользать из лап смерти, в то время как мы сами ищем с ней встречи. Абэ вспомнил о своем звании и приказал Кусакабэ – и Гото – никогда больше не высказывать вслух ничего подобного, потому что такие мысли оскорбляют преданность и патриотизм. Я промолчал, чтобы не нарушать гармонию, но про себя согласился с Гото. Даже у самых младших членов команды глаза стариков.”

“I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.”

“Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician or the Emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on the metro trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.”

“Snow is bruised lilac in half light: such pure solace.”

“- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters.-Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.”

“I find a certain comfort," confesses Marinus, "in humanity's helplessness.”

“What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.”

“Ah, Klaas! Dear Klaas reverted to compost many years ago.”

“How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?”

“clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.”

“You can’t go changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up even more”

“Too cowardly to be a warrior, but not enough of a coward to lie down and roll over like a good doggy.”

“Assured her I’ve never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now,”

“(both circumvented the handicap of deafness by answering only those questions they believed had been asked & accepting only those answers they believed had been uttered - a stratagem embraced by many an American advocate)”

“Я кланяюсь и закрываю за собой дверь, но он уже не смотрит в мою сторону. Рядом с кабинетом никого нет. Сбоку от стены стоит поднос. Сам себе удивляясь, я открываю крышку чайника и плюю в него. Должно быть, стресс.”

“Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.”

“After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.”

“Humor is the ovum of dissent, and the Juche should fear it.”

“Svijet je školski ravnatelj koji se bavi tvojim manama. Ne mislim u nekom u nekom mističnom ili Isusovom smislu. Nego prije na foru da se uporno spotičeš preko neke skrivene stube, bez kraja i konca, dok ti konačno ne sine: pazi, stuba! Sve su stvari u kojima kiksamo skrivene stube, bilo da smo odveć sebični ili odveć sluga pokoran ili što već. Ili nikad nećeš primijetiti u čemu griješiš pa ćeš dovijeka trpjeti posljedice ili ćeš jednog dana primijetiti i popraviti stvar. A što je najveći vic, kad napokon skužiš gdje je ta skrivena stuba i pomisliš: Ej, pa ipak život nije baš takva koma, slijedi TRES! Strmoglaviš se niz novo skriveno stubište.Nikad kraja”

“Beg pardon?" I detected large deposits of vanity. Vanity is the softest of bedrocks to sink shafts into.”

“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.”

“A rocker rose like Poseidon and flexed his knuckles.”

“Dogs are much crueler than BAFTAs”

“But an ink brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner's mind.”

“The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.”

“Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day--as a votive offering to human knowledge--but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men--with one young woman--and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire.”

“Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree.”

“Two old people in a room devoid of furniture, steam rising from their teacups. They were motionless and expressionless. Waiting for something. I wish I could go into their room and sit down with them. I'd give them my Rolex for that. I wish they would smile, and pour me a cup of jasmine tea. I wish the world was like that.”

“War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.”