Never Let Me Go Quotes

“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It was like there was some parallel universe we all vanished off to where we had all this sex.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Don’t you wonder sometimes, what might have happened if you tried?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later...”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“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 certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’
‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that's what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they'd really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the paint and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I realised, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafes were for everyone else.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you, I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she’d have her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that’s anyone’s guess.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'

Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.

Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn't care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I'd have more chance of doing everything right.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“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 time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that.
But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Even at the time, I realised this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed only to make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K.--she'd done something really embarrassing to us during the day--we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“There was a time you saw me once, one afternoon, in the dormitories. There was no one else around, and I was playing this tape, this music. I was sort of dancing with my eyes closed and you saw me.'
'...yes, I remember that occasion. I still think about it from time to time.'
'That's funny, so do I.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“I quizzed him a lot on this point and i suspect the truth was that it was like a lot of things at that age: you don't have any clear reason, you just do it. You do it because you think it might get a laugh, or because you want to see if it'll cause a stir. And when you're asked to explain afterwards, it doesn't seem to make any sense.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and - no matter how much we despised ourselves for it - unable quite to let each other go.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It might be just some trend that came and went," I said. "But for us, it’s our life.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go