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.
KAZUO ISHIGUROAll children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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 -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
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.
KAZUO ISHIGURO