But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?

It’s precisely because of the pain, the we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.

Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs.

At my core, there is nothing. Neither is it parched wastelands. At my core, there is love. I'll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever --- his strength, his intelligence, his kindness. He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.