“This layers, like some kind of transparent sponge kind of thing, stands there between Eri Asai and me, and the words that come out of my mouth have to pass through it, and when that happens, the sponge sucks almost all the nutrients right out of them.”

“There are 2,500 kinds of sponges, all of them consist largely of holes.”

“Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.”

“Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out”

“... I looked through the car's rear window for a final wave, and it felt like someone had invaded my chest and squeezed all the juice out of my heart until it was a tiny dry sponge.”

“It's a sponge and I'm a sponge and for a second there all our sponge parts are one and I don't just have square pants, everything about me is squarish because I'm part of a wall.”