"It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical."

"I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off."

"True, luck may rule over parts of a person's life and luck may cast patches of shadow across the ground of our being, but where there's a WILL-- much less a strong will to swim thirty laps or run twenty kilometers -- there's a way to overcome most any trouble with whatever stepladders you have around."

"Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds-staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible."

"For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see."

"Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most."

"I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few -- very few, I would imagine- who are impressed by it, but rarely would anyone like it."

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die."

"There was much about him that was fine and beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed."

"Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality."

"We walked side by side to the station. The sweater kept me comfortable in the night air."Okay, I'll keep plugging away, she said."Wasn't much help, was I?"No, actually, it took a load off me just to be able to talk.We caught trains going in opposite directions from the same platform."You're really not lonely? she asked one last time. And while I was searching for a good reply, her train came."

"I wasn't able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we'd done the buttons up wrong."

"I'm not totally mad at you. I'm just sad. You're all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside."

"Even if things were the same, people's perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter."

"A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea."

"I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?"

"A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over."

"If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies."

"Aomame raised her glass to the moon and asked, "Have you gone to bed with someone in your arms lately? The moon did not answer. "Do you have any friends? she asked. The moon did not answer. "Don't you get tired of always playing it cool? The moon did not answer."

"I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal."

"In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible."

"It's not so easy for people to end their own lives. It's not like in the movies. There, they do it like nothing, no pain, and it's all over, they're dead. The reality is not like that. You lie in bed for ten years with the piss oozing out of you."

"I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me."

"Dreams are things from the past. They aren't from the future. That wasn't you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?Yeah, I'd say. But I wasn't convinced."

"I don't know, it's stupid being 20," she said. "I'm just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody's pushing me from behind."

"He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition."

"Aren't you afraid of dying?Not really. I've watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it."

"My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it."

"It wasn't like there was some obvious change. Actually, the problem was more a lack of change. Nothing about her had changed - the way she spoke, her clothes, the topics she chose to talk about, her opinions - they were all the same as before. Their relationship was like a pendulum gradually grinding to a halt, and he felt out of synch."

"Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge."

"I thought about Kizuki. "So you finally made Naoko yours," I heard myself telling him. Oh, well, she was yours to begin with. Now maybe, she's where she belongs. But in this world, in this imperfect world of the living, I did the best I could for Naoko."

"Maybe it's just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows - maybe even tomorrow."

"I loved Midori. And I had probably known as much for a while. I had just been avoiding the conclusion for a very long time."

"People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love."

"Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart."

"It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one's hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself."

"Hatred is like a tow-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself."

"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."

"Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness."

"Are you asking because you really want an answer?"

"Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't lead to anything."

"I'm alone inside the world of the story, my favorite feeling in the world."

"That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time."

"The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter."

"I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all."

"I just got my signals crossed. First thing, I have to untangle the connections. Otherwise, I come away empty-handed. Or with someone else's hands. Or even with a missing hand."

"No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. "

"Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart."

"Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?"