Things can be seen better in the darkness," he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. "But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is

It's basically impossible for everybody's justice to prevail or everybody's happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over.

You know what it’s like when you’re trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake?

The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible.

I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

You're not a kid any more. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.