Nassif Abou Khalil

“This feels good, I thought. I'm just happy he's here. I don't need him to be mine. I wanted to appreciate him the way I did giant trees in the park, which gave people shelter and relief but didn't belong to anybody.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I was also learning that every single person in the world had been hurt by their family at some point. I wasn’t special at all—some people dealt with it well, and some didn’t, but that was the only difference, and either way, we were all nourished and cherished by our families, and at the same time limited and defined by them—that was what it meant to be human, I understood.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I’d always believed I didn’t take up a lot of space in this world—that it hardly mattered whether I was here or not. When a person left, the people around them got used to their absence. That was true enough. But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn’t help but feel like crying.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“We've been lonely for so long, and this was why. We were so lonely we couldn't even know it.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories