Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

“What do you think dignity's all about?'

The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.”

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”

“You say you’re? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?”

“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.”

“What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”

“We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”

“You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like… I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”

“It never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel being seen like that.”

“I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."… I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.”

“Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.”

“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”

“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”

“All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.”

“She always wanted to believe in things.”

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.”

“The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.”

“The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.”

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”

“I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.”

“If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”

“You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.”

“I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?”

“Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory…”

“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”

“Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.”

“A part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and-no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-unable quite to let each other go.”

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I’d known, maybe I’d have kept tighter hold of them, and not let unseen tides pull us apart.”

“It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.”

“As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things”

“What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.”

“But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.”

“When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.”

“She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.”

“Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.”

“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”

“And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later…”

“An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.”

“It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about, can you?”

“One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”

“Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?”

“Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.”

“There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life”

“It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.”

“But God will know the slow tread of an old couple’s love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole.”

“When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked,'then what are we fighting for?”

“What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.”

“What is this gallery? Why should she have a gallery of things done by us?”

“And I'm a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up.”

“Ruth insisted – that she really was afraid of us.”

“It's nothing to do with you anyway.”

“Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly.”

“I won't be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I've got a lot out of it, I have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest.”

“The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside.”

“Tommy's got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.”

“This is all strictly against regulations, of course, and Marie-Claude should never have asked you in. And naturally, I should have turned you out the second I knew you were here. But Marie-Claude doesn't care much for their regulations these days, and I must say, neither do I.”

“Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose.”

“She said we weren't being taught enough.”

“My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.”

“I'd no idea if anyone was actually watching.”