Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight Quotes

“I am already out at sea. Floating in the water while gazing back at the innocent girl on dry sand who believes that she will never get wet.
It won't be long. Any second now the wave will arrive to wash around her feet and strike terror into her heart. Then she will know. She will understand that a woman's place is in the sea. Where the acts of floundering, drowning and gulping mouthfuls of salty water while struggling to swim against the current are the true essence of our sex.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“We are here together right now because of countless choices that were made but which we had no part in deciding.

If everything in life is a choice, then what does it mean to love a person? If love is merely a means for genes to satisfy a self-interested desire for descendants, then surely physical desire is enough for the purpose?

Perhaps love is a mechanism to ensure that helpless, immature human beings are cared for after coming into the world?”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“If I were younger, I might have been able to let the emotions of the moment carry me along, and throw everything away. Or I might have been capable of ending our relationship with a single stroke and leaving on the spot.

But the older one gets, the harder it is to do that kind of thing. All manner of compromises and calculations must be taken into account, and above all the fear of loneliness is real. If a few sad memories and hurt feelings are the tole price, then closing one's eyes to the other's faults and curling up in retreat is easy enough to do.

Adult wisdom is the wisdom to protect your heart.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“My heart beat faster and I believed that I was in love. But it's hard for young teenagers to know what real love is. I behaved how I believed that a girlfriend ought to behave.

I said the things that I thought he wanted to hear, and I looked at him the way I thought he wanted me to. I believed I was being sincere. I was convinced that it was love.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“In our early days together we often gave each other gifts. CDs we liked, books, photographs, travel souvenirs, or cakes and other small delicacies. When people are in the process of becoming intimate they give each other things, all kinds of small, miscellaneous offerings. Every exchange leaves a mark of one's existence in the others world and gradually widens the scope of it. Thus by degrees we become special to each other. That's how we were supposed to be.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

“Some women do drag their pasts around, and I don't deny that I have that tendency too. But I usually keep that part of me closeted away in a separate room: the guest room, so to speak, where the guest can feel sorry for herself at leisure. Only occasionally do I invite her into the living room and allow her to wallow in self-pity to her heart's content.”
― Riku Onda, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight