Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “You notice and absorb so much.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

405. “That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

406. “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

407. “The Giant, once buried, now stirs.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

408. “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

409. “You see, because it’s stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south’ – she moved the pointer up and down – ’they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a lost corner.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

410. “Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of. Continentals.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

411. “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

412. “The Island was in the center of the kitchen, and perhaps to emphasize its fixed-down nature, had pale brown tiles that mimicked the bricks of a building.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

413. “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

414. “I’m proud of you. A good son. I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.’ ‘I’m afraid we’re extremely busy now, but we can talk again in the morning.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “You’re always there, taking it all in. So you know as well as I do. The way she keeps getting at me. There’s no reason a person has to take all that. She pushes it too far, then thinks it can all be fixed with a nice picture. Send the AF over with it. Well she has to understand. Things aren’t always that easily fixed.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

420. “I turned around on the Button Couch, estimating the tension had reached a level that could no longer justify complete privacy.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

421. “For they found they became oddly uncomfortable whenever the topic was broached, and before long an understanding had grown between them, in the silent way understandings do between a husband and wife of many years, to avoid the subject as much as possible. I say “as much as possible,” for there appeared at times to be a need – a compulsion, you might say – to which one or the other would have to yield.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

422. “Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

423. “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

424. “This gave us both a little chill, and though we giggled, we didn’t say any more about it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

425. “The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

426. “Car engines were.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “Looking back now, it feels like we spent ages in that steamed-up kitchen after breakfast, or huddled around half-dead fires in the small hours, lost in conversation about our plans for the future.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

435. “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

436. “Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “It is surely a professional responsibility for us all to think deeply about these things so that each of us may better strive towards attaining ‘dignity’ for ourselves.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

441. “The war, ghastly as it was, represented no more than “an awkward window in Man’s evolution” when for a few years our technical progress had run ahead of our organisational capacities.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

442. “Mr Capaldi pensava che dentro Josie non ci fosse niente di tanto speciale da non poter esser proseguito. Diceva alla Madre che aveva cercato dappertutto e non l’aveva mai trovato. Ma adesso credo che non cercasse nel posto giusto. C’era invece qualcosa di molto speciale, ma non era dentro Josie. Era dentro quelli che l’amavano.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

443. “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “Richard Carlisle,’ he said with a cheerful smile as I rose to shake it.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

449. “So identical were their pitiful whimpers, the way their screams gave way to desperate entreaties then returned to screams, that the notion came to me: this was what each of us would go through on our way to death, that these terrible noises were as universal as the crying of newborn babies.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

450. “We drove past a large creature with numerous limbs and eyes, then even as I watched, a crack appeared down its center. As it divided itself, I realized it had been, all along, two separate people – a runner and a dog walk woman – moving in opposite directions who for an instant happened to be passing one another. Then came a store with a sign saying ‘Eat In Take Out’ and in front of it, a lost baseball cap on the sidewalk.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro