Quotes from Kazuo Ishiguro

He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lorship'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?

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. 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 might have wished?

Hope,' he said. 'Damn thing never leaves you alone.

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

What do you think dignity's all about?' The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

When you are young, there are many things which appear dull and lifeless. But as you get older, you will find these are the very things that are most important to you.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me.

But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,' he said, 'and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn't that how it might be, trying to learn Josie's heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn't there always be others you'd not yet entered?

Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one's life

When it was too late for rescue, it was still early enough for revenge.

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it feel this way to you?

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.