Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

At night I dream about going to where I played when I was still young.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

memory is the only way home.

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.

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother.

When you finally go back to your old home, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood.

I think because I'm not a parent, my most immediate connection to childhood is my memory of my own childhood.

People wonder why I love Africa so much. I say this is where I was born and raised. My roots are in Africa; that's were I developed.

Sometimes with my children, I remember exactly how I felt as the child in this situation, not just how it feels to be me.

If you have children and want to give your future self a present, record their laughter as toddlers. When they're older and away from you, you might find that clip in the middle of the day, and it will transport you as surely as if you had a time machine.

I want my music to make you reminiscent or nostalgic of your childhood, or take you back to a better place.

I always cling to things that remind me of being a kid again.

I haven't had a chance to decorate my dressing room yet, but I have these pictures of myself as a kid that I want to put up because I said, 'I really want to make sure that I take that kid with me on this journey.' I want him to experience this.

Wisconsin will always be home to me in a nostalgic kind of way.

When I think of Paisley, I think of everything that has shaped my life.

She said I bet you dont remember me And I said only every other memory.

I'm surprised by how much I remember [on childhood on film]. I think it's just because I had these interesting moments. Of course, you never know when they're interesting moments, but there was a lot of stuff that I remember and have attached significance to later. I remember enough. I remember highlights.

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Everything about me remembers everything about you

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.