“It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.”

“People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying.”

“Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.”

“Whatever is the loss becomes greater each time we meet. It is a well that will never be filled. It is dark, unbearably so.”

“But that was the last time. That was…how should I say it? ... the one moment in my life when I was able to draw closest to Eri ... the one moment when she and I joined heart to heart as one: there was nothing separating us. After that, it seems, we grew further and further apart. We separated, and before long we were living in different worlds. That sense of union I felt in the darkness of the lift, that strong bond between our hearts, never came back again. I don't know what went wrong, but we were never able to go back to where we started from.”

“We used to spend hours talking. We never got tired of talking, never raun out of topics - novels, the world, scenery, language. Our conversations were more open and intimate than ane lovers'.”

“If people lived forever—if they never got any older—if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy—do you think they’d bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less—philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.”