Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.

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.

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

All you decent, well-meaning gentlemen, let me ask you, have you any idea what sort of place the world is becoming all around you? The days when you could act out of your noble instincts are over. Except of course, you here in Europe don't yet seem to know it.

It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.

I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn't care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I'd have more chance of doing everything right.

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.

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.