I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou’re always in a rush, or else you’re too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
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You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.
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I want my words to survive translation.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
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Even at the time, I realised this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.
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You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.
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Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.
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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.
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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
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And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
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I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
KAZUO ISHIGURO






