Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

I used to think that I wouldn't change anything from my past, because doing so would inevitably affect who I am now. But considering my current state, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to go back in time to fix things.

I don't harp on what I could change about the past, because I can't go back and change it. But definitely a lot of things I would change.

There are moments in one's life where you look back and you say, 'Well, I wish I had done this differently.'

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.

Given the opportunity, I might change a choice I made, but you can't regret making what you thought was the best decision at the time.

All of us from time to time look back and think we could've handled things differently or better.

There's a lot of things in my past that wouldn't have necessarily been my choices but at the same time, going back in time and changing something, I wouldn't want to do that because I like where I came out.

I look at the past and I see myself.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

To deny our pasts is to burn the bridge we must cross to self-understanding.

She said she’d often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She’d spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you’d done in a past life you didn’t need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn’t be ready to do now.

Any damn fool can predict the past.

I certainly wished I hadn't stressed quite as much or had such insecurity at times. I wish I had trusted my instincts on some occasions when I didn't and I wish I had listened to better advice when I didn't. But overall, I have to look at the glass as half full and acknowledge that I am all of the moments of my life, the good and the not so good.

We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history.

It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small matters over a period of years. But the catch is that you can never know when a seemingly small decision may prove to be, from the vantage of later years, the big decision of your life.

Don´t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again. And never judge anything of the past from the new perspective that is arriving, because the new is new, incomparably new and the old was right in its own context, and the new is right in its own context.

At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.

Don't be so bitter about a bad experience from your past that you miss the opportunities in front of you.

In a serious sense, wanting to change something from the past doesn't work for me - change something you don't enjoy now rather than regretting it later.

Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.

If someone were to say, 'Well, what would you have done differently?' I'd say, 'Nothing'. I think you need to make mistakes.

I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

Hindsight, I think, is a useless tool. We, each of us, are at a place in our lives because of innumerable circumstances, and we, each of us, have a responsibility (if we do not like where we are) to move along life's road, to find a better path if this one does not suit, or to walk happily along this one if it is indeed our life's way. Changing even the bad things that have gone before would fundamentally change who we are, and whether or not that would be a good thing, I believe, it is impossible to predict. So I take my past experiences... and try to regret nothing. -Drizzt Do'urden

If you were to take the lessons and experiences you've acquired in the past one year, five years or 10 years and skillfully invest that into your future, how powerful would that be? Where would you find yourself at the end of the next year?