“It was a face that instantly robbed those who gazed upon it of a good thirty percentof the energy they needed to go on living.”

“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.”

“It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.”

“I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it!The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself,just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me.”

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”

“When you're in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who's decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed with whether he remembered to lock the door when he left home.”

“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.”