“Six years during which time I'd laid three cats to rest. Burned how many aspirations, bundled up how much suffering in thick sweaters, and buried them in the ground. All in this fathomlessly huge city Tokyo.”

“Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people… What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow”

“There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.”

“Far away, I could hear them lapping up my brains. Like Macbeth's witches, the three lithe cats surrounded my broken head, slurping up that thick soup inside. The tips of their rough tongues licked the soft folds of my mind. And with each lick my consciousness flickered like a flame and faded away.”

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

“If sympathy was all it took to clean up shit, I'd have 50 times as much sympathy as anybody else”

“Huge organizations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.”