Kazuo Ishiguro

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly.”

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

“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.”

“Perhaps that's what I feel, an exhaustion of possibilities, a claustrophobia of Time.”

“But then, what is the sense in forever speculating what might have been? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction.”

“What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course of events?”

“After all, what is the point in revisiting the past unless it has some bearing on the present?”

“But for a great deal of my life, I was lonely. I don't mean I was alone. I was lonely.”

“It may be that the best we can do is to remember, and to tell it again.”

“Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying?”

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

“It is one of the superstitions of the human mind that we can find a solution to burning questions.”

“Good-hearted people don't just appear out of nowhere. They're made. You have to be taught to be good.”

“I'm a writer because I'm not a very good-looking man. It's a way of having a romance.”

“I've a feeling it's all circular. The way the seasons are. The way hours are. We're always starting again.”

“All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it.”