“That soft but penetrating voice that caressed your ears and climbed through your brain like a vine.”

“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.”

“Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own. We're still in the minority, so the media lump us together as "The Oversensitive Young", or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.”

“... 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”

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

“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”

“After hanging up the phone Aoyama sank back back on the sofa feeling like a balloon in a warm blue sky.”