Listen - God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.

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

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

The problem was, I think, that the places I fit in were always falling behind the rimes.