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“Night has fallen, and morning will come too,” Kenji said while gazing at the paddy field. “Spring will arrive, and Autumn too. Everything is split in halves. The grass grows, trees wither, animals are born, and they die……when you live with the land, you slowly come to understand that nature is made up of halves. When something bad happens……when a storm or erosion happens, we feel like bad things will only continue. But in truth, the good and the bad, they are all part of nature……part of living. That’s how everyone in the village thinks.”

“I do not understand,” Akutagawa said, looking at the same scenery. “So fortune and misfortune are equal halves? Do you want to say the same thing to my comrades who died in the slums?”

“That is why you’re the half that’s left, Akutagawa-san.” Kenji looked at Akutagawa. “You survived. And with a very powerful Ability, too. Everybody passed on their good halves to you, I’m sure.”
― Kafka Asagiri

“We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“Conventionality is not morality.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde