Kazuo Ishiguro

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

“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.”

“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,...”

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

“That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because t...”

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the e...”

“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...”

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

“That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a...”

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any...”

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

“If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”

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

“Nos-tal-gic,’ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for ‘nostalgic.’ ‘Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-t...”

“Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might...”

“As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the...”

“I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certai...”

“إن المجرم الحديث قد أصبح أكثر مهارة ، أكثر طموحا ، وأكثر جرأة ، والعلم قد وضع نظاما كاملا من الأدوات المعقدة تحت تصرفه”

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

“I remember being taught all about how Japan was created by the gods, for instance. How we as a nation were divine and supreme. We had to memorize the text book word for word. Some things are...”