Quotes from Kazuo Ishiguro

We're the only ones who care now. The likes of you and me, Ono, when we look back over our lives and see they were flawed, we're the only ones who care now.

I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there's nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can't excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn't know better.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

I quizzed him a lot on this point and i suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don't have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it'll cause a stir. And when you're asked to explain afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense.

The danger isn't the river's speed, friend, but its slowness.

There was a time you saw me once, one afternoon, in the dormitories. There was no one else around, and I was playing this tape, this music. I was sort of dancing with my eyes closed and you saw me.' '...yes, I remember that occasion. I still think about it from time to time.' 'That's funny, so do I.

If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.

Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way.

The colonel nodded. Our childhood seems so far away now. All this - he gestured out of the vehicle - so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown. Well, Colonel, it's hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life. It's only now I've started to make my journey from it.

It doesn't matter how old someone is, it's what they've experienced that counts. People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing.

So I know just how much it matters to you that people who love one another are brought together, even after many years.

Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn't mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something. #Page: 120

Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician's trickery?

After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.

It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did.

But I really wanted to find it for you. And when it looked in the end like it wasn't going to turn up, I just said to myself, one day I'll go to Norfolk and I'll find it there for her.' 'The lost corner of England,' I said.

The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning. What people call the floating world, Ono, was a world Gisaburo knew how to value.

The fact is, of course,' I said after a while, 'I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.

Yes, I do love my husband. I didn't at first. I didn't at first for a long time. When I left Darlington Hall all those years ago, I never realized I was really, truly leaving. I believe I thought of it as simply another ruse, Mr. Stevens, to annoy you. It was a shock to come out here and find myself actually married. For a long time, I was very unhappy, very unhappy indeed.

If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.

I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.

Boatman, I've spoken honestly to you, and I hope it doesn't cast your earlier judgement of us in doubt. 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.

when people are getting poorer, and children are growing more hungry and sick all around you, it is simply not enough for an artist to hide away somewhere, perfecting pictures of courtesans.

What I mean is, right from that first time, there was something in Tommy's manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed to say: "Yes, we're doing this now and I'm glad we're doing it now. But what a pity we left it so late.