“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”

“The young peoplenowadays – men and women, amateurs and pros – generally fallinto one of two categories: either they don’t know what it isthat’s most important to them, or they know but don’t have thepower to go after it. But this girl’s different. She knows what’smost important to her and she knows how to get it, but shedoesn’t let on what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not money, orsuccess, or a normal happy life, or a strong man, or some weirdreligion, but that’s about all I can tell you. She’s like smoke: youthink you’re seeing her clearly enough, but when you reach forher there’s nothing there. That’s a sort of strength, I suppose.But it makes her hard to figure out.”

“It's always precisely the sort of smug old wanker you would never ever want to end up like. We don't live the way you tell us to because we're afraid that if we do we'll grow up to be like you, and the thought of that is unbearable. It's alright for you because you'll be dead soon anyway, but we've still got another fifty or sixty years to live in this stinking country.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news.”