“He wakes! The steel giant wakes! Long, long ago he rose from the sea, with the blood of life streaming from his belly. And then they buried him with thunder...and...carrots...at Stonehenge. But now he wakes again. The Age of Rotten Fish is over; the Age of Steel and Bombs is upon us. And he had come to give us life and strength, to free us form these cells, to restore us once again to baseball and ping pong! Sent by God from the Great Beyond!!!”

“But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe.”

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”

“Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts stabbing me, somehow I feel sort of peaceful, like I'm myself again.”

“In heated rooms, he often felt the outlines of his body, the border between him and the external world, grow disturbingly fuzzy.”

“The song was the late Ishihara Yujiro’s “Rusty Knife,” and Sakaguchi’s singing was so bad that itgave the lyric a strange new pathos and poignancy. Listening to his version, Suzuki Midori wasreminded that no one ever said it would be easy to go on living in this world; Takeuchi Midoripondered the noble truth that nobody’s life consists exclusively of happy times; Henmi Midorivowed to remember that it’s best to keep an open heart and forgive even those who’vetrespassed against us; and Tomiyama Midori had to keep telling herself that hitting rock bottomis in fact the first step to a hopeful new future.”

“He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train.”