David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas Quotes

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

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

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

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

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

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

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.

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

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

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

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.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

. . .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.

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.

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

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay.

The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it.

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.

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.

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

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. "There's a fackin' q

Survival often demands our courage.

You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.

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

Nothing has changed, except everything.

...that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too.

Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

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

A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

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

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

One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.

Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.

Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with!

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.