For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.

Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.