W. J. T. Mitchell Quotes

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

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

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

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

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

If your words're true, they're armed.

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

I think we think in terms of stories.

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.

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

Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

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

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

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you're afraid of them.

It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace." "It doesn't feel very all right." "That's because it's not the end.

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

There are so many cities in every single city.

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

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

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.

Music’s a wood you walk through.