Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.

There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person's heart.

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.

What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.

I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up