There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

I'm not afraid to die. What I'm afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.

It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.

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

A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.

A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.