Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

72 Sourced Quotes

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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?

Kazuo Ishiguro
My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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...

Kazuo Ishiguro
There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Tommy's got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.

Kazuo Ishiguro
It's hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its very validity….But I've long since lost all such doubts, Ono,' he continued. 'When I am an old man, when I look back over my life and see I have devoted it to the task of capturing the unique beauty of that world, I believe I will be well satisfied. And no man will make me believe I've wasted my time.

Kazuo Ishiguro
What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.

Kazuo Ishiguro
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, 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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
And I'm a Hailsham student - which is enough by itself sometimes to get people's backs up.

Kazuo Ishiguro
It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.

Kazuo Ishiguro
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.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose.

Kazuo Ishiguro