I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I'd give it everything I had.

In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.

It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

We were, the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to be-aquired reality that would fill us and make us whole.

But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.

But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness." "You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one.