I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Her partially open lips now opened wide, and her soft, fragrant tongue entered his mouth, where it began a relentless search for unformed words, for a secret code engraved there. Tengo's own tongue responded unconsciously to this movement and soon their tongues were like two young snakes in a spring meadow, newly wakened from their hibernation and hungrily intertwining, each led on by the other's scent.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

No matter what form the relationship might take, he was the only person she could picture sharing her life with.