Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

102. “I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

103. “All you decent, well-meaning gentlemen, let me ask you, have you any idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don’t yet seem to know it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

104. “What use is a god with boundless mercy, sir? You mock me as a pagan, yet the gods of my ancestors pronounce clearly their ways and punish severely when we break their laws. Your Christian god of mercy gives men licence to pursue their greed, their lust for land and blood, knowing a few prayers and a little penance will bring forgiveness and blessing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

105. “So I know just how much it matters to you that people who love one another are brought together, even after many years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

106. “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

107. “Because you know how lousy it feels, people telling you how perfect things will be and they’re not being straight.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

108. “I suppose I’m saying Josie and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other any more. I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her. At least like the Josie I once knew. So it wasn’t ever a deception, Klara. Whoever that was you were dealing with back then, if they could see right into my heart, and right into Josie’s, they’d know you weren’t trying to pull some fast one.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

109. “It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

110. “It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

111. “I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It’s only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He’s a very international writer.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

112. “For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

113. “When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

114. “The earlier years – the ones I’ve just been telling you about – they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all, even the not-so-great things, I can’t help feeling a sort of glow.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

115. “And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

116. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

117. “We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that’s anyone’s guess.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

118. “Perhaps God’s so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he’s wishing himself to forget.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

119. “But this small episode is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

120. “When a man induces his wife to turn suspicious thoughts against her own father, then that is surely cause enough for resentment.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

121. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

122. “You’ve got to enjoy yourself. 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. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

123. “I thought sooner or later someone would start saying it had gone too far, but it just kept on, and no one said anything. I.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

124. “The pond lay to the south of the house. To get there you went out the back entrance, and down the narrow twisting path, pushing past the overgrown bracken that, in the early autumn, would still be blocking your way. Or if there were no guardians around, you could take a short cut through the rhubarb patch. Anyway, once you came out to the pond, you’d find a tranquil atmosphere waiting, with ducks and bulrushes and pond-weed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

125. “Then the Coffee Cup Lady reached the RPO Building side, and she and the man were holding each other so tightly they were like one large person, and the Sun, noticing, was pouring his nourishment on them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

126. “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

127. “Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

128. “We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

129. “When we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we grow up, and we were free to travel around the counry, we would always go and find it in Norfolk... And that’s why years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn’t just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

130. “One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

131. “How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

132. “As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

134. “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

135. “How is it possible to hate so deeply for deeds not yet done?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

136. “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?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

137. “I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

138. “A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

139. “As I say, these were helpful lessons for me. Not only had I learnt that changes were a part of Josie, and that I should be ready to accommodate them, I’d begun to understand also, that this wasn’t a trait peculiar just to Josie, that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passersby – as they might in a store window, and that such display needn’t be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

140. “Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

141. “And what made these heart-to-hearts possible – you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time – was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we’d honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn’t use against each other anything we’d talked about during those sessions.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

142. “What kind of god is it, sir, wishes wrong to go forgotten and unpunished?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

143. “Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways. But there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition merely for its own sake.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

144. “But that’s a funny idea. Maybe I did know, somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn’t.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

145. “Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

146. “The heart you speak of,’ I said. ‘It might indeed be the hardest part of Josie to learn. It might be like a house with many rooms. Even so, a devoted AF, given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

147. “Something has changed in the character of the younger generation in a way I do not fully understand, and certain aspects of this change are undeniably disturbing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

148. “I really appreciated having the tape-and that song-back again. Even then, it was mainly a nostalgia thing, and today, if I happen to get the tape out and look at it, it brings back memories of that afternoon in Norfolk every bit as much as it does our Hailsham days.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

149. “Of course, it is tragic that so many of his generation died as they did, but why must he harbour such bitterness for his elders?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

150. “It must be nice sometimes to have no feelings. I envy you.’ I considered this, then said: ‘I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.’ She laughed unexpectedly, making me start. ‘In that case,’ she said, ’maybe you shouldn’t be so keen to observe.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro