Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What occurs under the public gaze with so much pomp and ceremony is often the conclusion, or mere ratification, of what has taken place over weeks or months within the walls of such houses.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

52. “This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

53. “If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

54. “I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the ‘Tortoises’ of this world. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. And I suppose, in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

55. “One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one’s limitations.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

56. “You will agree that such is often the way with matters one has given abiding thought to over a period of time; one is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

57. “At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

58. “Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

62. “I realised, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafes were for everyone else.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

63. “The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

64. “She always wanted to believe in things.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

65. “I wish I could go out and walk and run and skateboard and swim in lakes. But I can’t because my mother has Courage. So instead I get to stay in bed and be sick. I’m glad about this. I really am.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

68. “You’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

69. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

70. “Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that – little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

71. “There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

72. “If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there’s this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

73. “I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

74. “Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

75. “Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. You know that. For people our age it’s a hard one to let go.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

76. “A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating.” Ruth.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

77. “Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

78. “Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

79. “Because whatever the song was really about, in my head, when I was dancing, I had my own version. You see, I imagined it was about this woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies. But then she’d had one, and she was so pleased, and she was holding it ever so tightly to her breast, really afraid something might separate them, and she’s going baby, baby, never let me go.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

80. “They fought as though the most important thing was to damage each other as much as possible.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

81. “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

82. “I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write – with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

83. “Boatman, I’ve spoken honestly to you, and I hope it doesn’t cast your earlier judgement of us in doubt. For I suppose there’s some would hear my words and think our love flawed and broken. 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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

84. “The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

86. “The danger isn’t the river’s speed, friend, but its slowness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

88. “Even so, I believe there’s still hope. I believe help might come from a place the adults haven’t yet considered. But we need to do something now quickly.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

89. “Revolution? Really, Ono! The communists want a revolution. We want nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite, in fact. We wish for a restoration.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

90. “It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one’s face. And I believe it was then, looking on that view, that I began for the first time to adopt a frame of mind appropriate for the journey before me. For it was then that I felt the first healthy flush of anticipation for the many interesting experiences I know these days ahead hold in store for me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

91. “The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

92. “Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery? I see how devoutly you wish it, for your old horrors to crumble as dust. Yet they await in the soil as white bones for men to uncover.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

94. “But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,’ he said, ’and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

95. “It’s not faith you need. Only rationality.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

97. “Sometimes,’ she said, ’at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness. I’m glad you watch everything so carefully, Klara.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

98. “If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

100. “But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro