David Mitchell is a god of words. A brilliant, utterly divine artist that pushes creative boundaries beyond akin to Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Mary Shelley and their more modern equivalents (to which I’ll go more into on future posts).

When I first read Cloud Atlas, I waited for someone to jerk me from the blinding Utopian tunnel I suddenly found myself floundering, gasping in the radiance of such wit. It was all consuming. It pivoted my life into a rebirth of everything sublime and whole. I know no other words that gifted me with such beauty, hope, weightiness, and wisdom.

And when the indubitably ingenious Wachowski sisters rendered his words, hefting them further into that great ether, I died and lived yet again it was so fanfuckingtastic.

(oh look, more David Mitchell rebirth puns wink cough wink).

All hail the great collaborations and creative teams as this is one, if not, the best in human history.

I said what I said.

‘“Embrace your enemy,” the elders urged, “to prevent him striking you.” (“Embrace your enemy,” Henry quipped, “to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.”)‘

“What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”

“Plainly, music is oxygen for us both.”

“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.”

“No drug, no religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse.”

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

‘”Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”’

“Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”

“Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.”

“The color of monotony is blue.”