Quotes from Kazuo Ishiguro

There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.

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.

the slow tread of an old couple's love for each other, and understand how black shadows make part of its whole.

is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In

I'm sure she felt it too, because we'd always hold each other very tight after times like that, as though that way we'd manage to keep the feeling away.

each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don't you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you'd have to learn not just her mannerisms but what's deeply inside her? Wouldn't you have to learn her heart?

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.

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.

their points sharpened like giant pencils, completely

Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we had wished?

Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father.

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.

What was I like in those days, Father? Was I like a mad person?' 'You were very shocked, which was only to be expected. We were all shocked, those of us who were left.

an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

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

I was present, as Josie liked me to be, but wishing to give privacy, stood in the shadows, my face turned to the refrigerator.

Sea air does you a lot of good.

however accurately one may fill in the surface details of one's mirror reflection, the personality represented rarely comes near the truth as others would see it.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan.

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.