More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Thinking of all he had lost, he felt as if a weight had been lifted, a sensation that was part defiance and part new confidence that all would come out right in the end.
If loving again were indeed possible, it would have to be love of a completely different sort. Something more suited to him as he was now, something more realistic and, ultimately, more significant.
Their love had been reckless. To reach fulfillment, their feelings for one another had needed to pass through a corridor just two and a half degrees wide. Instead of burning up on reentry, they had ricocheted like a pair of rocks “skipping off a pond,” losing for all time any chance of coming together.
A coincidence could not in itself be either good or evil. And yet, if somewhere along the line any little thing had been different, the configuration of the world today might not be the same;
More than their inability to love each other wholeheartedly, their greatest misfortune lay in their inability to love themselves—the selves they became around each other.
No violent hatred filled her; rather, she felt hollow. Somewhere in the back of her mind, one word echoed: Why?
But at the same time, free will increases their remorse over the past. They feel there must have been something they could have done. Sometimes, a belief in destiny is comforting.”
“What wasn’t a mistake is . . . right now. This moment that has completely rewritten my past.”
The Japanese character kizuna, “human bonds,” was everywhere, having taken on special meaning in the face of devastating loss, and its ubiquity induced a manic state that left him, too, exhausted.
Certainly, the past could be changed. But could you change the past without also changing the present?
In its solitary flight, that paper airplane was soaring high over new vistas—and now that she knew not only the beauty of its line of flight but also the sensitive quivering of the tip slicing cleanly through the air, the music stirred her more profoundly than ever before.
