Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

352. “It is important to learn how to fail, to learn how to be wrong in a way that minimizes pain to you and others and maximizes what you can learn from the experience.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

354. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “For it was then that I felt the first healthy flush of anticipation, for the many interesting experiences I know these days ahead hold in store for me.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

360. “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

361. “People who love one another are brought together, even after many years.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

362. “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

363. “How could written fiction hope to survive against the might of cinema and television if it didn’t offer something unique, something the other forms couldn’t do?”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

364. “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

365. “Yeah,” I said. “Gone to Norfolk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

366. “Though you must understand, it’s still work in progress. And it’s not always easy for a layperson to understand the way these things slowly take shape.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

367. “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

368. “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

369. “The other cars had to pass noisily around us, but there was no anti-parking sign. Through the windshield, we could see another under-bridge area in front of us, and the cars that passed us were forming a line to enter it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

371. “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

372. “Then she continued to walk away.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

373. “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

374. “But I can see him studying his newspaper, breaking off regularly to look up at the passers-by on the pavement outside. From the way he does this, I had thought at first that he was waiting for a companion, but it would seem he wishes merely to greet acquaintances as they pass by.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

375. “A wound that healed slowly, but heal it did.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

376. “Hello, Josie.’ Rick, looking up at us, had on a cautious smile. ‘I heard this rumour we might be friends again.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

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 was an engineer, never a scientist.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

399. “They’d been up to this town called Cromer, up on the north Norfolk coast.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

400. “Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro