Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “A theoretical chance. Atlas Brookings may make a big thing of it, but it’s less than two percent. That’s all. Their intake of unlifteds is less than two percent.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

304. “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

305. “I could see similar townhouses on the opposite side of the street. There were six of them in a row, and the front of each had been painted a slightly different colour, to prevent a resident climbing the wrong steps and entering a neighbour’s house by mistake.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

306. “But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

307. “There was Ruth, lying on her side across my rug, peering at the spines of the cassettes in the low light, and then the Judy Bridgewater tape was in her hands.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

308. “Sufficiently generous and liberal to be open to all students of high caliber, even some who haven’t benefited from genetic editing.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

309. “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

310. “It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

311. “Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

312. “What Axl and I feel today in our hearts for each other tells us the path taken here can hold no danger for us, no matter that the mist hides it now. It’s like a tale with a happy end, when even a child knows not to fear the twists and turns before. Axl and I would remember our life together, whatever its shape, for it’s been a thing dear to us.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

313. “So why had we stayed silent that day? I suppose it was because even at that age – we were nine or ten – we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory. It’s hard now to remember just how much we knew by then. We certainly knew – though not in any deep sense – that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line there were donations waiting for us.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

314. “So that feeling came again, even though I tried to keep it out: that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

315. “Once in a while – and I soon got better at watching those at the window while appearing to gaze at the RPO Building – a child would come to stare at us, and there would be a sadness there, or sometimes an anger, as though we’d done something wrong. A child like this could easily change the next moment and begin laughing or waving like the rest of them, but after our second day in the window, I learned quickly to tell the difference.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

316. “It’s just a bit of nostalgia to pass the time.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

317. “But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

318. “I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. 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

319. “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

320. “I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if the Almighty had created us all as – well – as sort of plants. You know, firmly embedded in the soil. Then none of this rot about wars and boundaries would have come up in the first place.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

321. “Miss Kenton and my father had arrived at the house at more or less the same time – that is to say, the spring of 1922 – as a consequence of my losing at one stroke the previous housekeeper and under-butler.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

322. “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

323. “We won the right to be free citizens. And it’s one of the privileges of being born English that no matter who you are, no matter if you’re rich or poor, you’re born free and you’re born so that you can express your opinion freely, and vote in your member of parliament or vote him out. That’s what dignity’s really about, if you’ll excuse me, sir.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

324. “I must say, something about this small encounter had put me in very good spirits; the simple kindness I had been thanked for, and the simple kindness I had been offered in return, caused me somehow to feel exceedingly uplifted.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

325. “The reason they go for Tommy’s because he’s a layabout.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

326. “I have come here to relate something to you, Father.’ ‘Then relate it briefly and concisely. I haven’t all morning to listen to you chatter.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

327. “You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

328. “The Mother was wearing a coat – a thin, dark, high-ranking one – which moved with the wind around her body, so that for a moment she reminded me of the dark birds that perched on the high traffic signals even as the winds blew fiercely.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

329. “What made the tape so special for me was this one particular song: track number three, “Never Let Me Go.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

330. “People do have a political conscience of sorts here. They feel they ought to have strong feelings on this and that, just as Harry urges them to. But really, they’re no different from people anywhere. They want a quiet life. Harry has a lot of ideas about changes to this and that, but really, no one in the village wants upheaval, even if it might benefit them. People here want to be left alone to lead their quiet little lives. They don’t want to be bothered with this issue and that issue.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

331. “Do you mean, Manager, that they lost each other?’ She was quiet for another moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, eventually. ‘That must be it. They lost each other. And perhaps just now, just by chance, they found each other again.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

332. “I could suddenly see something,” he explained to us. “A garden I’d not yet entered. There it was, in the distance. There were things in the way. But for the first time, there it was. A garden I’d never seen before.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

333. “But on further observation, I saw that even if the danger topics were avoided – topics like Josie’s education assignments, or her social interaction scores – the uncomfortable feeling could still be there because it really had to do with something beneath these topics; that the danger topics were themselves ways the Mother had devised to make certain emotions appear inside Josie’s mind.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

335. “Because I don’t want you coming against your will. That wouldn’t be fair. I really want you to come, but if you said, Josie, I don’t want to, then I’d say to Mom, okay, we can’t have her, no way. But you do want to come, right?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

336. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

337. “What I’m saying is that we were all of us struggling to adjust to our new life, and I suppose we all did things back then we later regretted. I was really upset by Ruth’s remark at the time, but it’s pointless now trying to judge her or anyone else for the way they behaved during those early days at the Cottages.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

338. “What is more, sir,” his lordship went on, “I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by ‘professionalism.’ It appears to mean getting one’s way by cheating and manipulating. It appears to mean serving the dictates of greed and advantage rather than those of goodness and the desire to see justice prevail in the world. If that is the ‘professionalism’ you refer to, sir, I don’t care much for it and have no wish to acquire it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

339. “You don’t see how it is for some parents. Not only must they lose their children, they must lose them to things they don’t understand.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

340. “Goodnight, Klara. Be as wonderful tomorrow as you were today.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

341. “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. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

342. “The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

343. “I’m sure she barely knew the meaning of loneliness with you here.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

345. “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

346. “The way you’re always willing to give people a decent chance. That’s a good trait.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

347. “I now realized this woman was livid with anger. Not the sort that suddenly hits you then drains away. No. This woman, I could tell had been in a kind of white heat for sometime. It’s a sort of anger that arrives and then stays put at a constant level like a bad headache never quite peaking and refusing to find a proper outlet.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

348. “When I look back to this period, and remember it was less than twenty years from the end of a world war in which the Japanese had been their bitter enemies, I’m amazed by the openness and instinctive generosity with which our family was accepted by this ordinary English community.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

349. “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

350. “And for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro