Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it–unable quite to let each other go.
KAZUO ISHIGUROYou 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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She always wanted to believe in things.
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There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
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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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When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
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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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After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
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Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
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I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
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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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What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
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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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What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that’s been given to them, and find some dignity.
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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 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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The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO