I’m not good at talking,” Naoko said. “Haven’t been for the longest while. I start to say something and the wrong words come out. Wrong or sometimes completely backward. I try to go back and correct it, but things get even more complicated and confused, so that I don’t even remember what I started to say in the first place. Like I was split into two or something, one half chasing the other. And there’s this big pillar in the middle and they go chasing each other around and around it. The other me always latches onto the right word and this me absolutely never catches up

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

So I'm not crazy after all! I thought it looked good myself once I cut it all off. Not one guy likes it, though. They all tell me I look like a first grader or a concentration camp survivor. What's this thing that guys have for girls with long hair? Fascists, the whole bunch of them! Why do guys all think girls with long hair are the classiest, the sweetest, the most feminine? I mean, I myself know at least two hundred and fifty unclassy girls with long hair. Really.

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don't believe that." he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave."

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.' 'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.' 'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.' 'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.