“. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.”

“Now, for the first time ever, a story had escaped his control. It had taken on a life of its own, and all the imagination in the world would be insufficient to halt it. He felt numb.”

“The college dreamed on-- awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had nothing, he had taken nothing.”

“After the small woman had left, Ushikawa stared at the door for the longest time. She had shut the door behind her, but there was still a strong sense of her in the room. Maybe in exchange for leaving a trace of herself behind, she had taken away a part of Ushikawa's soul. He could feel that new void within his chest. Why did this happen? he wondered, finding it odd. And what could it possibly mean?”

“…any cat he spoke to would stay quite still with an expression of faint surprise on its face as if it had never heard such good sense in all its life nor ever expected to again.”

“He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.”