“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.The day you die.”

“Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.”

“But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks."You write down your criticisms, do you?""I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all.""But what good does it do?""None at all.""A waste of effort.""A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.”

“Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.”

“A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.”

“Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.”

“I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.”