Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’ ‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.