I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGUROMany 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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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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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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.
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I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.
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I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
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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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There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
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Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.
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Love isn’t about when you first meet. It’s about the many, many years you spend together, when you’re trying to keep that flame burning.
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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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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Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.
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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
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My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO






