No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
But I have my life, I’m living it. It’s twisted, exhausting, uncertain, and full of guilt, but nonetheless, there’s something there.
Everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.
Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more–it’s sad, but that’s the truth.
…there’s nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can’t warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.
Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated – defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.
Nakajima’s past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That’s what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.
Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.
And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more …
I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.
I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing people are flesh. Flesh and water.
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. I’m grateful for it.
It didn’t matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.
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.
When people start getting depressed there’s just no end to it—things just seem to get worse and worse.
I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.
The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.
Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too — that’s just the way things work.
Things are just things. They can’t bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.
When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.
Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.
My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.
A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness. It’s only natural, when two separate universes touch.
I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
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.
I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell.’ I couldn’t stop laughing.
Once you’ve recognized your own limits, you’ve raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you’re closer to the real you…
My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.
I wished my heart would break and get it over with.
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.
Things that don’t matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.
I didn’t care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything– it didn’t matter. I felt close to him, and I’d come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.
Nakajima’s presence didn’t put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.
That’s the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done
it’ll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night
I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.
It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I’d miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I’m sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
When someone tells you something big, it’s like you’re taking money from them, and there’s no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.
It was the truth. I felt a yearning love for every instant that passed.
She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn’t know how to handle.