“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.”

“In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation.”

“Twenty years was a long time. But Tengo knew that if he were to meet Aomame in another twenty years, he would feel the same way he did now. Even if they were both over fifty, he would still feel the same mix of excitement and confusion in her presence. His heart would be filled with the same joy and certainty.”

“Sumire was a hopeless romantic, a bit set in her ways - innocent of the ways of the world, to put a nice spin on it. Start her talking and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with - most people in the world, in other words - she barely opened her mouth. She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she took the train. She'd get so engrossed in her thoughts at times she'd forget to eat, and she was as thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian film - like a stick with eyes. I'd love to show you a photo of her but I don't have any. She hated having her photograph taken - no desire to leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man.”

“And most likely, that was the future in a nutshell, Sumire growing ever more distant. It made me sad. I felt like I was a meaningless bug clinging for no special reason to a high stone wall on a windy night, with no plans, no beliefs. Sumire said she missed me. But she had Miu beside her. I had no one. all I had was-me. Same as always.”

“How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name?”

“For her first summer vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it's not for me. First of all, I hate package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody you meet in a group like that makes me sick.”