Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

353. “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

354. “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

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. “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

357. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “For the likes of yourself, it’s always been easy to exert your influence. You can count the most powerful in the land as your friends. But the likes of us here, sir, we can go year in year out and never even lay eyes on a real gentleman.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

381. “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

382. “This is why I find it so hard to be civil around people like Capaldi. When they do what they do, say what they say, it feels like they’re taking from me what I hold most precious in this life.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

383. “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

384. “Keiko, unlike Niki, was pure Japanese, and more than one newspaper was quick to pick up on this fact. The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

385. “The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “What was important to us, as Ruth said one evening when we were sitting in that tiled room in Dover, looking out at the sunset, was that “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 around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

397. “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

398. “He was looking at me in complete innocence and I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted badly to tell him what was going on, and I suppose I knew that to do anything else would be to betray the trust we’d built up since the moment I’d reminded him about his polo shirt. And for me to strap up his arm in a splint would have meant my becoming one of the main perpetrators of the joke.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

399. “Then she continued to walk away.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

400. “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