Banana Yoshimoto

It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.

...there's nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can't warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?

Nakajima's presence didn't put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.

I didn't care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything_ it didn't matter. I felt close to him, and I'd come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it__ a kitchen, if it__ a place where they make food, it__ fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)

I can't imagine a life without a story.

Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.

I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately i couldn't protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered.Live like a flower. You have that right. It's something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And it's enough.

We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it__ more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did _ but now I knew it because now I was able to put it into words. But I don__ mean this in the fatalistic sense; we__e constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can__ bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.

I wished my heart would break and get it over with.

My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.

Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you...

Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.