“We should be able to time travel," he said. "Back to an age when society was kinder to the Rubenesque woman.""Hmph." I wasn't able to say much."I'd love that. I love softness. Love curves. The more, the better.""D'you really?""Why wouldn't I? Think of all the words associated with a bit of extra flesh. Generous. Ample. Voluptuous. Bountiful. Beautiful, sensual words. Contrast them with their opposites. Mean. Insufficient. Meager. Miserly."I snuffled into his velvet jerkin or doublet or whatever it was and looked up at him. "You should be a professional morale booster," I told him. "You're very kind to say all this but --""Kind?" he burst out. "No, I'm not kind! I don't feel sorry for you. I want you.”

“Why I love him is, I don't know, because he seems very brave and kind and sweet. All that stuff but something else, too. I don't know what something else, but he's different somehow, and what I'm trying to say is it's a good kind of difference, whatever it is.”

“I love him as well. It's the same kind of love. But I can't say it. I won't be able to say it.”

“I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level. ”

“I couldn't save Kataoka."If I loved him, I had to grant him his last wish."So I told him what he wanted to hear."I said, 'No, you're no longer human.'"I hadn't been able to say anything.I couldn't speak, I couldn't move, I couldn't understand a word of what Miu was telling me."Kataoka smiled kindly."Like he was thanking me."Then he jumped off the roof."Osamu Dazai and I killed him.”

“You know you love someone when he makes all the ordinary moments feel extraordinary. When doing absolutely nothing feels like everything. Gray assumed he wasn't enough. And what I didn't admit, what I didn't realize at the time, is that it's just the opposite. He was too much, That kind of love is the kind that traps you. And I'm not ready for it yet.”