Julia > Recent Status Updates

“‘Look forward to really being in love for the first time, Bea. Look forward to behaving aristocratically without any outward proofs of your aristocracy. Look forward to having nothing but the dignity and intelligence and tenderness that God gave you—look forward to making those materials and nothing else, and making something exquisite with them.’” 60

“‘Bea— if I seem indifferent to your misfortunes, it’s only because I know how well things are going to turn out in the end. If it seems crude of me not to hate the idea of your pairing off with Constant, it’s only a humble admission on my part that he’s going to make you a far better husband than I ever was or will be.’” 60

“‘Because you’d still have to take the roller-coaster ride. I didn’t design the roller coaster, I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t. I just know what it’s shaped like.’” 54

“‘Man — you must have some kind of guardian angel — lets you keep cool as a cucumber, no matter what…” 42

“‘How long is the human race going to be around, Master?’

‘I look at the future and I find that I shall not be in the Solar System when the human race dies out. So the end is as much a mystery as to you.’” 48

“Things fly this way and that, my boy, with or without messages. It’s chaos, and no mistake, for the Universe is just being born. It’s the great becoming that makes the light and the heat and the motion, and bangs you from hither to yon.” 34

“The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms.” 37

“And to what do you attribute this wonderful luck of yours?”
“Who knows? I guess somebody up there likes me.” 15

“… everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” 20

“I was so absorbed in the things that I couldn’t change, I forgot the most important thing.”

“Kei wasn’t afraid to die. Her anxiety and sadness stemmed from the thought of not being there to see her child grow up.”

“Negativity is food for a malady, one might say.”

“I just think that if Kumi’s death had led to unhappiness for both me and my parents, then the unhappiness would have been her only legacy.

So that’s why I intend to lead a life that creates a more wonderful legacy for Kumi’s life.”

“This has always been my dream,” Kumi muttered, looking down, her tears spilling onto the table.
“Hirai’s heart beat wildly. So Kumi did have her own dreams. She wanted to do something too. Hirai’s selfishness had robbed her of that—a dream worth crying over.”
“… What dream?” she asked Kumi.
With red, teary eyes, Kumi looked up and took a deep breath. “To run the inn together. With you…”

“You are my wife, and if life becomes too hard for you as my wife, I want you to leave me. You don’t have to stay by me as a nurse. If I am no good as a husband, then I want you to leave me. All I ask is that you can do what u can as my wife. We are husband and wife after all. Even if I lose my memory, I want to be together as husband and wife. I cannot stand the idea of staying together only out of sympathy.”

“The woman in the dress gave a slight smile as she quietly closed the book, a novel titled The Lovers.”

WHATTTT

From the Introduction by David Cronenberg: “…But the Sansa family is the Samsabeetle’s context and his cage, and his subservience to the needs of his family both before and after his transformation extends, ultimately, to his realization that it would be more convenient for them if he just disappeared, it would be an expression of his love for them, in fact, and so he does just that, by quietly dying.”

“Was he a beast, that music so moved him? He felt as if he were being shown the way to that unknown nourishment he craved.”

“Before, when all the doors were locked, everyone kept trying to come in, and now that he had opened the one door and the others had apparently been opened during the day, no one came, and the keys were sticking in their locks from the outside.” 55

“Simultaneously, though, he continued to remind himself that calm consideration—indeed, the calmest consideration—was far preferable to resolutions seized on in despair.” 29

“Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”

“You chose Midori. Naoko chose to die.”

“The memories would slam against me like waves of an incoming tide, sweeping my body along to some strange new place — a place where I lived with the dead.”

“Powerless, I could go nowhere; sorrow itself would envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that tears were simply oozing out of me like perspiration.”

“I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn’t adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness.”

“Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.” 269

“What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I feel for Midori is a wholly different emotion. It stands and walks on its own, living and breathing and throbbing and shaking me to the roots of my being.” 268

“All I could do was glare at the incomprehensible pages of print and wonder what was going to happen to me from now on, and how the things around me would be changing. I felt as if the world was pulsating every now and then.” 267

“We got into her bed and held each other, kissing as the sound of the rain filled our ears. Then we talked about everything from the formations of the universe to our preferences in the hardness of boiled eggs.” 265

“We have to go on unraveling the jumbled threads one at a time, without losing hope.”

“If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.”

“It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.” 258

… I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass — but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.” 255

“In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain…