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?
KAZUO ISHIGUROThere 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.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
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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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If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
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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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As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.
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And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.
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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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People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
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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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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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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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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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I think it’s quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.
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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 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.
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But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points’, one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.
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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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There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
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An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.
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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 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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As with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.
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I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO