A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

She curled up and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her ear was right above his heart. She was listening to his thoughts. "I need to know this," Aomame said. "That we're in the same world, seeing the same things.

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.

So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not consciously intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original intention had have been.