Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

252. “Not that anything significant started to happen immediately afterwards; but for me at least, that conversation was a turning point. I definitely started to look at everything differently. Where before I’d have backed away from awkward stuff, I began instead, more and more, to ask questions, if not out loud, at least within myself.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

253. “Might as well tell you. In that shop we were in, they had this shelf with loads of records and tapes. So I was looking for the one you lost that time. Do you remember, Kath? I never told you at the time, but I tried really hard to find it. I remember looking for ages. And when it looked in the end like it wasn’t going to turn up, I just said to myself, one day I’ll go to Norfolk and I’ll find it there for her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

254. “Our life together’s like a tale with a happy end, no matter what turns it took in the way.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

255. “Oji just happened to suggest he had one or two.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

256. “One thing I have witnessed is that public life can change people unrecognizably in a few short years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

257. “Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

258. “But tell me, Taro, don’t you worry at times we might be a little too hasty in following the Americans? I would be the first to agree many of the old ways must now be erased for ever, but don’t you think sometimes some good things are being thrown out with the bad? Indeed, sometimes Japan has come to look like a small child learning from a strange adult.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

259. “The world is crawling with authors touring now. They’re like performance artists.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

260. “My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

261. “One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

262. “But they did eventually set off, with walking sticks and bundles on their backs, on a bright morning of wispy white clouds and a strong breeze.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

263. “They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

264. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

265. “Can it be, husband, you still fear the mist’s fading, never mind the promise I made you?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

266. “It was that exchange, when we finally mentioned the closing of Hailsham, that suddenly brought us close again, and we hugged, quite spontaneously, not so much to comfort one another, but as a way of affirming Hailsham, the fact that it was still there in both our memories. Then I had to hurry off to my own car.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

267. “Year after year goes by, and nothing gets better. All we do is argue and debate and procrastinate. Any decent idea is amended to ineffectuality by the time it’s gone half-way through the various committees it’s obliged to pass through. The few people qualified to know what’s what are talked to a standstill by ignorant people all around them.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

268. “Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

269. “Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it – and Gawain’s posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

270. “Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that – little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time – like somehow we were letting the side down.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

271. “My mother fell silent for some moments. Then she said: ‘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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

272. “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 were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

273. “Manager, I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this, Manager?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

274. “By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

275. “I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

276. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

277. “But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

278. “They’d been up to this town called Cromer, up on the north Norfolk coast.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

279. “A ‘great’ butler can only be, surely, one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity. As.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

280. “And I could see the weariness in the boy AF’s walk, and wondered what it might be like to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you. Until I saw this pair it hadn’t occurred to me that an AF could be with a child who despised him and wanted him gone, and that they could nevertheless carry on together.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

281. “It is essential, then, to keep one’s attention focused on the present; to guard against any complacency creeping in on account of what one may have achieved in the past.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

282. “It’s a great privilege, after all, to have been given a part to play, however small, on the world’s stage.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

283. “There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

284. “Do you believe in the human heart? Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and unique? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

285. “At times it was almost as it had been years ago, when on a sunny day the family would sit there together exchanging relaxed, often vacuous talk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

286. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

287. “She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

288. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

289. “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

290. “All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

291. “He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted! All those years, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really -one has to ask- what dignity is there in that?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

292. “The kitchen was especially difficult to navigate because so many of its elements would change their relationships to one another moment by moment.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

293. “What do you think she’d have said if we’d asked her? ‘Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?’ She’d have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

294. “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

295. “For it is, in practice, simply not possible to adopt such a critical attitude towards an employer and at the same time provide good service.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

296. “Kids can be hurtful sometimes. They believe if you happen to be an adult, nothing can possibly hurt you.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

297. “In bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

298. “It is surely a professional responsibility for us all to think deeply about these things so that each of us may better strive towards attaining ‘dignity’ for ourselves.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

299. “I’m sure, sir, there are all kinds of ethical issues. But in the end, it’s for legislators to decide how these things get regulated, not people like me. For now, I just want to learn as much as I can, so I can take my understanding to the next level.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

300. “A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki The Overstory by Richard Powers The Farm by Joanne Ramos The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro