“I was a happy melancholy, though — a contradiction in terms, to be sure, but every human understands this paradox, because they have all felt it.”

“For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.”

“All my friends thought I was a very happy human being. Because that's how I acted- like a really happy human being. But all that pretending made me tired. If I acted the way I felt, then I doubt my friends would have really hung out with me. So the pretending wasn't all bad. The pretending made me less lonely. But in another was, it made me more lonely because I felt like a fraud. I've always felt like a fake human being.”

“I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.”

“The world is a contradiction; the universe a paradox.”

“Paradoxes haunt the lives of born wayfinders, driving them to seek resolutions to the apparent contradictions in their lives, enticing them into the world that is beyond words and can therefore contain paradox without contradiction.”