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“But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.” 21

“I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly.” 16

“I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say—yes you might say, nature without humanity.” 18

“And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds me.” 19

“I am quietly slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear.” 8

“I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.” 9

“He’s burning his candle at both ends; in three months I have seen him turn yellow and melt away.”

“When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.” 11

“The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.” 5

“I don’t even bother looking for words. It flows in me, more or less quickly. I fix nothing, I let it go. Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time… I forget them almost immediately.” 7

“I must not put in strangeness where there is none.” 1

“Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.” 2

“I’m going to bed. I’m cured. I’ll give up writing my daily impressions, like a little girl in her nice new notebook.” 3

“When we were in each other’s arms, I knew something that was beyond words. It was the mystery of being close to someone who is not family. My heart dropped out, and I was feeling what people fear the most; I touched the deepest despair a person can know… If I could get through this, morning would come, and I knew without a doubt that I would have fun again, laugh out loud. If only the sun would rise…”

“The thing was… she had reminded me that I could get excited over something unknown, and a tiny window opened in my heart.” 133

“But still, his eyes, his whole person, were saying one thing only. He himself would never speak it. To say it would mean to suffer from it. To suffer terribly. That thing was, ‘I want her to come back.’
More than words, it was a prayer.” 136

“‘Yes. It’s delicious. So delicious it makes me grateful I’m alive.’” 125

“What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness.” 127

“Somewhere deep in my heart I felt I had known her long ago, and the reunion made me so nostalgic I wanted to weep tears of joy.” 129

“He lived exactly as if his awareness of things had been formed in some other dimension, after which he was plopped down on this planet to fend for himself.” 117

“We both laughed. The was the only way the two of us had to make light of the wounds in our hearts.” 118

“How afraid was he? Did he think of me, if even for a flickering instant? Was the moon climbing high in the sky as it was now?” 125

“Without a prospect in sight, day after day went by, like losing one’s mind bit by bit. I would repeat to myself, like a prayer: It’s all right, it’s all right, the day will come when you’ll pull out of this.” 113

“…the expression on her face hinted that she had tasted deeply of the sorrows and joys of this world.” 115

“Through my curtains I would see the sky getting lighter, blue-white, and I would feel abandoned in the chill and silence of dawn. It was so forlorn and cold, I wished I could be back in the dream. There I would be, wide-eyed, tortured by its lingering memory.”

“Sleeping at night was what I feared the most. No—worse than that was the shock of awakening. I dreaded the deep gloom that would fall when I remembered he was gone. My dreams were always about Hitoshi. After my painful, fitful sleep, whether or not I had been able to see him, on awakening I would know it had only been a dream—in reality I would never see him again. And so I tried not to wake up.”

“Yuichi’s smiling face seemed to sparkle. I knew I had touched something inside him.” 102

“In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering.” 104

“There was electric charge between our hearts.” 110

“The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn’t bring it back.” 111

“‘You see, Yuichi, how much I don’t want to lose you. We’ve been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy—we, too young to know about it, couldn’t handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty, and ugliness, but if only you’ll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, whatever comes, together.’” 101

“I knew it: the glittering crystal of all the good times we’d had, which had been sleeping in the depths of memory, was awakening and would keep us going. Like a blast of fresh wind, the richly perfumed breath of those days returned to my soul.”

“‘Why is it that everything I eat when I’m with you is so delicious?’” 100

“We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously.” 97

“I felt that I was inside Yuichi’s nightmare, and that if I stayed here too long I, too, would become a part of it, destined to be snuffed out in the gloom.” 99

“Since then, even when he was standing next to me, I had felt as if Yuichi were in some other world, at the other end of a telephone line.” 89

“People aren’t overcome by situations or outside forces; defeat invades from within, I thought.”

“Before my eyes something was coming to an end, something I didn’t want to end, but for which I lacked the energy to suffer, much less fight.” 92

“The times of great happiness and great sorrow were too intense; it was impossible to reconcile them with the routine of daily life.” 87

“… But I’m not free, I realized; I’ve been touched by Yuichi’s soul. How much easier it would be to stay away forever.” 88 (this one hit differently. made me… ponder.)

“‘I really needed you to make me laugh,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with his arm, ‘so much I couldn’t stand it anymore.’” 51

“Having known such joy, there was no going back.” 59

“‘… But love is not a joke, it also means sharing someone else’s pain.’” 72

“In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses.” 75

“From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.” 48

“‘There!’ she said. ‘Self defense, that makes us even.’ Those were her last words.”

“I felt like my insides had been gouged out. And now she is no longer here. She isn’t anywhere anymore.” 45

“As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.” 42

“But if a person hasn’t ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is.” 41

“There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.” 42

“The night was so deathly silent that I felt I could hear the sound of the stars moving across the heavens.” 39

“If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something… By doing that you come to understand your own limitations.” 41

“Am I losing my mind? I wondered. It was like being falling-down drunk: my body was independent of me. Before I knew it, tears were flooding out… I had a feeling that I wasn’t crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.” 35

“The conversation we just had was like a glimpse of stars through a chink in a cloudy sky—perhaps, over time, talks like this would lead to love.” 30

“When I thought, now at last I won’t be torn between two places, I began to feel strangely shaky, close to tears.” 33

“The scratching of our pens mingled with the sound of raindrops beginning to fall in the transparent stillness of the evening.” 28

“Even I, slow as I am, finally understood his excessive unnaturalness… When I took a good look in his eyes, I understood.
He was terribly, terribly sad.” 29

“Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. I’ve always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being.”21
“I loved the Tanabes’ sofa as much as I loved their kitchen. I came to crave sleeping on it. Listening to the quiet breathing of the plants, sensing the night view through the curtains, I slept like a baby. There wasn’t anything more I wanted.I was happy.”22

“Her power was the brilliance of her charm and it had brought her to where she was now… That quality must have condemned her to an ice-cold loneliness.” 19

“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own?” 21

“That sofa was delectable. It was so big, so soft, so deep, I felt that once I surrendered to it I’d never get up again.” 15

“Maybe all I had been hoping for was a bed in which to be able to stop thinking, just for a little while, about what happened before and what would happen in the future.” 16