Life & Wisdom Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

Regret is usually framed as a courtroom: evidence, verdict, life sentence. Ishiguro flips it into something quieter and more unnerving - a simple scheduling conflict with fate. "Another life" is presented as perfectly plausible, almost adjacent, like a parallel train you could have boarded if you’d arrived two minutes earlier. Then comes the hard pivot: "but I am having this one". Not choosing. Not winning. Having. The verb matters: it suggests endurance as much as possession, a life received and carried rather than authored.

That tension is pure Ishiguro. Across his novels, characters circle the idea that the self is built as much from what we refuse to face as what we decide. The line captures how people metabolize disappointment: not by eliminating the alternate life, but by letting it haunt the room while continuing to set the table. It’s a consolation that refuses the cheap comfort of "everything happens for a reason". Instead, it offers a mature, compromised acceptance: meaning is not guaranteed by the road taken; it’s improvised under the weight of the roads closed off.

The subtext is also a critique of modern optimization culture - the fantasy that with better choices, better information, better hustle, you could have unlocked the best version of yourself. Ishiguro’s sentence punctures that mythology with calm precision. Yes, there were other lives. No, you don’t get to test-drive them. The only honest response is to live inside the irrevocability, and keep going anyway.