Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

302. “It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

303. “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

304. “As we got older, we went on talking about the Gallery. If you wanted to praise someone’s work, you’d say: “That’s good enough for the Gallery.” And after we discovered irony, whenever we came across any laughably bad work, we’d go: “Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “I tried to imagine me and Rosa getting so angry with each other we would start to fight like that, actually trying to damage each other’s bodies. The idea seemed ridiculous, but I’d seen the taxi drivers, so I tried to find the beginnings of such a feeling in my mind. It was useless, though, and I’d always end up laughing at my own thoughts.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

309. “The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

310. “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

311. “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

312. “Why was I so hostile to Moira B. that day when she was, really, a natural ally? What it was, I suppose, is that Moira was suggesting she and I cross some line together, and I wasn’t prepared for that yet.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

313. “There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know, and to demand that each and every one of them contribute ‘strong opinions’ to the great debates of the nation cannot, surely, be wise. It is, in any case, absurd that anyone should presume to define a person’s ‘dignity’ in these terms.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

317. “So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

318. “They fear loneliness and that’s why they behave as they do. Perhaps Josie too.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

319. “Miss Emily went on shaking her head. ‘It was never true. Even before the Morningdale scandal, even back when Hailsham was considered a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things, even then, it wasn’t true. It’s best to be clear about this. A wishful rumour. That’s all it ever was. Oh dear, is that the men come for the cabinet?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

320. “So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

322. “Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

323. “But I really wanted to find it for you. 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

324. “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

325. “A land of fences is so temporary. You can change things as easily as a stage set. I used to act, you know. Sometimes in decent theaters. Wretched theaters too. Fences, what are they? Stage design. That’s the nice thing about England. Hedges give a sense of history properly set down in the land.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

326. “Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of. Continentals.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

327. “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

328. “I’m proud of you. A good son. I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.’ ‘I’m afraid we’re extremely busy now, but we can talk again in the morning.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

332. “Looking back now, it feels like we spent ages in that steamed-up kitchen after breakfast, or huddled around half-dead fires in the small hours, lost in conversation about our plans for the future.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

334. “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “In the meantime, my father’s condition had grown neither better nor worse. As I understood, he was asleep for much of the time, and indeed, I found him so on the few occasions I had a spare moment to ascend to that little attic room. I did not then have a chance actually to converse with him until that second evening after the return of his illness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

343. “What I mean is that we were ambitious, in a way that would have been unusual a generation before, to serve gentlemen who were, so to speak, furthering the progress of humanity.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

344. “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

345. “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

346. “All in all, this is an excellent place to partake of morning tea, but surprisingly few of the inhabitants of Taunton seem to wish to avail themselves of it. At.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

347. “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

348. “If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only about this big, then everything changes. It’s like they come to life by themselves. Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think about how they’d protect themselves, how they’d reach things.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

349. “And yet Arthur charged us at all times to spare the innocents caught in the clatter of war. More, sir, he commanded us to rescue and give sanctuary when we could to all women, children and elderly, be they Briton or Saxon. On such actions were bonds of trust built, even as battles raged.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

350. “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