Top 450 Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

403. “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

404. “I have come here to relate something to you, Father.’ ‘Then relate it briefly and concisely. I haven’t all morning to listen to you chatter.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

405. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

407. “The way you’re always willing to give people a decent chance. That’s a good trait.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

416. “You notice and absorb so much.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

422. “Car engines were.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

431. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

433. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

442. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Kazuo Ishiguro

449. “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

450. “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