Kazuo Ishiguro citations

Page 2

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”