maya ★

“My hands move. My feet move. I don't know how to move them, though. It's like everything is moving all these parts. It's funny. It's like I'm in there, somewhere inside myself, and the body I'm in keeps on changing, more and more and more and more, in ways I don't even know. I wish I didn't care. But I do care. And everything is always changing. Everything gets dark, and that darkness fills my eyes more and more. I don't want to keep them open. I don't want to see. I'm afraid, though. What if I close them and I can't open them again?”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“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

“My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never became the woman I imagined. And what was I expecting?”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy. Happiness can be defined all kinds of ways, but human beings, consciously or unconsciously, are always pulling for their own version of happiness. Even people who want to die see death as a kind of solace, and view ending their lives as the only way to make it there. Happiness is the base unit of consciousness, our single greatest motivator.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs