Quotes from Kazuo Ishiguro

For some reason, we called it umbrella sex; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were an umbrella.

You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.

The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God's mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?

it would have been so stupid, Niki went on, If you would just accepted everything the way it was and just stayed where you were. At least you made an effort.

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 also feel this way to you?

Yes. Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.

I don't know why, but it didn't seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me.

It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you? Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot... But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.

It might be just some trend that came and went, I said. But for us, it's our life.

What kind of god is it, sir, wishes wrong to go forgotten and unpunished?

Why should they be grateful? They came here looking for something much more. What we gave them, all the years, all the fighting we did on their behalf, what do they know of that? They think it was God-given. Until they came here, they knew nothing of it. All they feel now is disappointment, because we haven't given them everything possible.

you could sense just from the huge sky, that you were walking towards the sea.

Perhaps God's so deeply ashamed of us, of something we did, that he's wishing himself to forget.

Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it—and Gawain's posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.

Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited.

And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I'd always assumed I'd plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.

Yet are you so certain, good mistress, you wish to be free of this mist? Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?

I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the 'Tortoises' of this world. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. And I suppose, in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in.

I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half closed my eyes and imaginated this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call.

How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one's moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one's purse. #Page: 10

For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.

One thing I have witnessed is that public life can change people unrecognizably in a few short years.