Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

Whenever I meet people for the first time, I get them to talk for ten minutes. Then I size them up from the exact opposite perspective of all they’ve told me. Do you think that’s crazy? “No,” I said, shaking my head, “I’d guess your method works quite well.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

The most dangerous creature here would have to be me. So maybe I'm just scared of my own shadow.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

[...] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.