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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 23, p. 280

“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.”

Source: The Remains of the Day

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

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 23, p. 282

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

Source: Never Let Me Go

“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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

“What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes about feelings

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

Source: The Remains of the Day

“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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

“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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

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

Source: Never Let Me Go

“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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 3, p. 34

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”

Rukeyser, Rebecca. " Kazuo Ishiguro: Mythic Retreat https://www.guernicamag.com/mythic-retreat/" guernicamag.com interview. 1 May 2015. Interviews

Kazuo Ishiguro: Trending quotes

“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.”

On growing up in England, having left Japan at age 5. Conversation with , The Writer http://www.writermag.com/, volume 114, number 5, May 2001, collected in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, p. 189 https://books.google.com/books?id=lvuteIrz7JUC&pg=PA189&dq=%22there+was+another+life+that+i+might+have+had,+but+I%E2%80%99m+having+this+one%22 Interviews Context: I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

“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.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

“What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

“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.”

Source: The Remains of the Day (1989), p. 244
Context: It is now some twenty minutes since the man left, but I have remained here on this bench to await the event that has just taken place – namely, the switching on of the pier lights. As I say, the happiness with which the pleasure-seekers gathering on this pier greeted this small event would tend to vouch for the correctness of my companion’s words; for a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. 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? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

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

Source: Never Let Me Go (2005), Chapter 10

“She always wanted to believe in things.”

Source: Never Let Me Go

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

Source: Never Let Me Go

“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.”

Source: The Remains of the Day

“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.”

Source: The Remains of the Day

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

Source: Never Let Me Go

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

Source: Never Let Me Go

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

Dunn, Adam. " In the land of memory: Kazuo Ishiguro remembers when http://web.archive.org/web/20010625162920/http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/27/kazuo.ishiguro/" cnn.com Book News. 27 Oct. 2000 (archived from the original http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/27/kazuo.ishiguro/ on 2001-06-25). Interviews Context: More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

“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.”

Source: The Remains of the Day

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

Source: Never Let Me Go