Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said. “Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.

I'm not human. I'm a piece of machinery. I don't need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

Only the dead stay seventeen forever.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

Maybe the star doesnt even exist any more.Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.