“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.”

“Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.”

“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.”

“That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.”

“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.”

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”

“It was the perfect time and place for an inherently timid person like him to express hisinner pervert by peeing in public.”