Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “But to be frank, there’s much relief around the company. We feel now we can forget our past transgressions and look to the future. It was a great thing our President did.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “For I suppose there’s some would hear my words and think our love flawed and broken. 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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “You see it in films sometimes, when one person’s pointing a gun at another person, and the one with the gun’s making the other one do all kinds of things. Then suddenly there’s a mistake, a tussle, and the gun’s with the second person. And the second person looks at the first person with a gleam, a kind of can’t-believe-my-luck expression that promises all kinds of vengeance.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

368. “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

369. “Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

371. “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

372. “Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 1984 by George Orwell 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.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

373. “She’s no dream woman I keep telling you, princess. Everyone here knew her a month ago and had a good word for her. What can it be makes everyone, yourself included, forget she ever lived?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

374. “You’re much the senior in years, Master Axl, but in matters of blood, it may be I’m the elder and you the youth. I’ve seen dark hatred as bottomless as the sea on the faces of old women and tender children, and some days felt such hatred myself.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

375. “You know, Helen,’ Mr Vance said, ’this is a strange tactic you’re adopting here. Favoritism, like any other form of corruption, works best when it remains unacknowledged.”

— 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. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “I’d never before seen anything that gave, all at once, so many signals of anger and the wish to destroy. Its.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

381. “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

382. “Then she continued to walk away.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

383. “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? 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 in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “A friend of mine’s just had a baby,” Niki said. “She’s really pleased. I can’t think why. Horrible screaming thing she’s produced.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

392. “Look here, Stevens, the first of the delegates will be arriving here in less than a fortnight.’ ‘We are well prepared, sir.’ ‘What happens within this house after that may have considerable repercussions.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘I mean considerable repercussions. On the whole course Europe is taking. In view of the persons who will be present, I do not think I exaggerate.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

393. “I was upset. But I’m not any more. You have to look forward in life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

394. “It’s wrong that a man can’t get to see around his own country. Take my advice, get out of the house for a few days.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

395. “The game’s sealed when a player gives up having any strategy at all.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

396. “We’re going to be leaving here soon. It’s not like a game any more. We’ve got to think carefully.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

397. “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

398. “It’s hard to put the whole world to rights, but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse. I mean this in two particular senses.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

399. “Never mind the red-haired woman, Axl. It’s what else we’re not remembering.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

400. “It was bad luck for poor old Tommy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro