Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “But Axl, we can’t even remember those days. Or any of the years between. We don’t remember our fierce quarrels or the small moments we enjoyed and treasured. We don’t remember our son or why he’s away from us.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

352. “Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

353. “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

354. “You spend so much time with someone, you find you get used to him.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

355. “They conversed at such moments in a speech that was like a code, making me wonder if this was on account of my presence in the room, but I quickly understood it had simply to do with their familiarity with each other’s lives, and that there was no intention to exclude my understanding.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

361. “Sea air does you a lot of good.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

362. “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

363. “They were afraid because we were new models, and they feared that before long their children would decide it was time to have them thrown away, to be replaced by AFs like us.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

364. “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

365. “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

366. “I think I sensed how beyond that line, there was something harder and darker and I didn’t want that. Not for me, not for any of us.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

367. “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

368. “In those early months, we’d somehow developed this idea that how well you were settling in at the Cottages – how well you were coping – was somehow reflected by how many books you’d read. It sounds odd, but there you are, it was just something that developed between us, the ones who’d arrived from Hailsham.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

373. “I remember Laura was demonstrating to me an especially disgusting way of blowing your nose for when you really wanted to put off a boy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

374. “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

375. “You believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in a poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

380. “But it was not so much the content of our conversation as the little smiles she gave at the end of utterances, her small ironic inflections here and there, certain gestures with her shoulders or her hands, which began to recall unmistakably the rhythms and habits of our conversations from all those years ago.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

381. “The truth is, Japan is headed for crisis. We are in the hands of greedy businessmen and weak politicians. Such people will see to it poverty grows every day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

382. “It was my wish to re-build my Japan in fiction, to make it safe, so that I could thereafter point to a book and say: ‘Yes, there’s my Japan, inside there.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “About him and his wife voting for different parties. A few years ago that would have been unthinkable.” “No doubt.” “Quite extraordinary the things that happen now. But that’s what’s meant by democracy, I suppose.” Ogata-San gave a sigh. “These things we’ve learnt so eagerly from the Americans, they aren’t always to the good.” “No, indeed they’re not.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

388. “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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

389. “Why did we take away your artwork? Why did we do that? You said an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. When you were discussing this with Marie-Claude. You said it was because your art would reveal what you like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

390. “Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

391. “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

392. “But I could not escape the feeling that what I was really seeing was a weariness with life; the spark which had once made her such a lively, and at times volatile person seemed now to have gone.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

393. “Why write a novel if it was going to offer more or less the same experience someone could get by turning on a television?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

394. “In fact, it is probably this very quality of Shintaro’s – this sense that he has remained somehow unscathed by things – which has led me to enjoy his company more and more over these recent years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

395. “In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down barriers.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

396. “When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the store window.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

398. “There was not a soul to be seen, and apart from a hammering noise echoing from somewhere distant, and an occasional coughing in a room to the back of the house, there is still no sound to be heard. The landlady is clearly not yet up and about, suggesting there is little chance of her serving breakfast earlier than her declared time of seven thirty.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

399. “I’d remembered of course that I should be grateful as always, but hadn’t been able to keep the disappointment from my mind.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

400. “What this all amounted to was that as I was growing up, long before I’d ever thought to create fictional worlds in prose, I was busily constructing in my mind a richly detailed place called ‘Japan’ – a place to which I in some way belonged, and from which I drew a certain sense of my identity and my confidence.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro