If she did experience sex-or something close to it-in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

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 couldn't tell wether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of season

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.