There is certainly a satisfaction and dignity to be gained in coming to terms with the mistakes one has made in the course of one’s life.
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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I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.
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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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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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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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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 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.
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I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
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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 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 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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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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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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She always wanted to believe in things.
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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.
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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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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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One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
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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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You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?
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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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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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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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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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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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