All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGUROThe Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.
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I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
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What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.
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We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they’re capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don’t care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they’ve done wrong.
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You’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.
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She always wanted to believe in things.
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I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends.
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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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I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
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Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.
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I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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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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It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made, and there’s this panic because you don’t know yet the scale of disaster you’ve left yourself open to.
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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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Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
KAZUO ISHIGURO






