“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.”

“I learned two important things about the sound I was searching for: that it had to be indirect, refracted or muffled in some way; and that the sound had to give the impression that it would continue forever- the sound of someone practicing piano heard faintly from an unknown direction, or the sound of gentle rain outside a window, punctuated by drops falling on the casement.”

“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!!!”

“... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”

“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.”

“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 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.”