“We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the images that we had been projecting there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat kitted out with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs.”

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?”

“Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about.”

“From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.”

“We were both at a delicate age, when the mere fact that we went to different schools and lived two train stops apart was all it took for me to feel our worlds had changed completely”

“I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.'Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were.”

“We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.”