You’re optimistic one moment, only to be racked the next by the certainty that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.

How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.

What’s more, you’re loads better than you think you are.” “So why is it I get to thinking that way?” I puzzled. “That’s because you’re only half-living.” she said briskly. “The other half is still untapped somewhere.

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You're born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you're both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?...One puts on a bikini like little semaphore flags and lies by the pool looking sexy, and the other puts on her school bathing suit and swims her heart out like a dolphin.

What's really important here," I whispered loudly to myself,"is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself have

Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. Everything that had accumulated over the years-- all he had seen, all the words he has spoken, all the values he had held-- all of it coalesced into one solid, thick pillar in his heart, the core of which was spinning like a potter's wheel. Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and rebirth of a planet.