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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

357. “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

358. “She was the one always pretending to have finished anything anyone happened to be reading; and she was the only one with this notion that the way to demonstrate your superior reading was to go around telling people the plots of novels they were in the middle of.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her. At least like the Josie I once knew. So it wasn’t ever a deception, Klara.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

394. “But you play that passage like it’s the -memory- of love. You’re so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That’s why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it’s not about joy, it’s about the memory of a joyful time that’s gone for ever.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “Up to a point, no doubt, there is some truth in what he says: in a country such as ours, people may indeed have a certain duty to think about great affairs and form their opinions.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro