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Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Kazuo Ishiguro
Top 10 Best Quotes
“She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.”
“If I'm alone at home, I get increasingly restless, bothered by the idea that I'm missing some crucial encounter out there somewhere. But if I'm left by myself in someone else's place, I often find myself a nice sense of peace engulfing me. I love sinking into an unfamiliar sofa with whatever book happens to be lying nearby.”
“But you play that passage like it's the -memory- of love. You're so young, yet you know desertion, abandonment. That's why you play that third movement the way you do. Most cellists, they play it with joy. But for you, it's not about joy, it's about the memory of a joyful time that's gone for ever.”
“Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way.”
“If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.”
“You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!”
“She thinks I've let myself down,' he was saying. 'But I haven't. I'm doing perfectly okay. Endless horizons are all very well when you're young. But get to your age, you've got to ... you've got to get some perspective. That's what kept going round in my head whenever she got unbearable about it. Perspective, she needs perspective. And I kept saying to myself, look, I'm doing okay. Look at loads of other people, people we know. Look at Ray. Look what a pig's arse he's making of his life. She needs perspective.”
“You know, Raymond, when you're at a party, at a dance. And it's maybe a slow dance, and you're with the person you really want to be with, and the rest of the room's supposed to vanish. But somehow it doesn't. It just doesn't. You know there's no one half as nice as the guy in your arms. And yet.... well, there are all these people everywhere else in the room. They don't leave you alone. They keep shouting and waving and doing daft things just to attract your attention. "Oi! How can you be satisfied with that?1 You can do much better! Look over here!" It's like they're shouting things like that all the time. And so it gets hopeless, you just can't dance quietly with your guy. Do you know what I mean, Raymond?”
“But for another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky.”
“I could suddenly see something," he explained to us. "A garden I'd not yet entered. There it was, in the distance. There were things in the way. But for the first time, there it was. A garden I'd never seen before.”
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Book Keywords:
love, relationships, memory, abondonment, dissatisfaction