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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAfter 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?
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.
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Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?
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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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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 cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. Of course, it rarely ends that way.
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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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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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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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Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
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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.
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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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As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.
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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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I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
KAZUO ISHIGURO