Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

402. “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

403. “You notice and absorb so much.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

405. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

419. “Car engines were.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

439. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

450. “I was an engineer, never a scientist.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro