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each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car’s restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud,
fasten your feelings to the earth—firmly, like attaching an anchor to a balloon.
I suppose I should say ‘almost everything,’ of course. No one can know everything about another person. Not even God, probably.” “Or the devil,” Aomame said.
All I can do is live the life I have. I can’t trade it in for a new one. However strange and misshapen
There on the shore one is overcome not by connected, logical thoughts, but by reflections and reveries. It is a sinister sensation, and yet at the very same time you feel the desire to stand for ever looking at the monotonous movement of the waves and listening to their threatening roar.
Aomame had struggled for a long time to forget everything that had happened to her before the age of ten. My life actually started when I was ten. Everything before that was some kind of miserable dream. Let me throw those memories away somewhere. But try as she might, her heart was constantly being drawn back into that nightmarish world. It seemed to her that almost everything she possessed had its roots sunk in that dark soil and was deriving its nourishment from it. No matter how far away I try to go, I always have to come back here, she thought.
“Is there anything you are afraid of?” “Of course there is,” Aomame said. “The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”
You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.”
They were two separate human beings who had come from—and were heading toward—entirely different places. By chance, they had spent some years of life together, that was all. It was a shame that things had come to that, Tengo believed,
“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
Your two fates did not cross through mere happenstance. The two of you set foot in this world because you were meant to enter it. And now that you have entered it, like it or not, each of you will be assigned your proper role here.”
“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart,”
I want him to take away this chill I feel in my body’s core. Then I want him to come inside me and stir me with all his might, like a spoon in a cup of cocoa, slowly, to the very bottom. If he would do that for me, I wouldn’t mind dying right then and there. Really.
Why do people have to build such depressing places? I’m not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?
