No, we weren't lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do. The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you...
No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happe...
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting sto...
Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall...And there...
Las lágrimas, mientras caían, se bañaban en la luz de la luna y brillaban hermosas como un cristal. Y he visto que mi sombra también derramaba lágrimas. Incluso se veía, nítida, la sombra de las lágri...
It’s the first thing I always say at our new employee training seminars. I gaze around the room, pick one person, and have him stand up. And this is what I say: I have some good news for you, and some...
It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually buil...
It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.
If a person remains tense for a long time he might not notice it himself, but it’s like his nerves are a piece of rubber that has been stretched out. It’s hard to go back to the original shape.
I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air.And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simpleform, a form that I am able to put into words, like this:Death...
Everybody burns out in this world; amateur, pro, it doesn't matter, they all burn out, they all get hurt, the OK guys and the not-OK guys both. That's why everybody takes out a little insurance. I've...
Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.
Don’t you see? It’s just not possible for one person to watch over another person forever and ever. I mean, suppose we got married. You’d have to work during the day. Who’s going to watch over me whil...
But that was the last time. That was…how should I say it? ... the one moment in my life when I was able to draw closest to Eri ... the one moment when she and I joined heart to heart as one: there was...
Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no tra...
At my core, there is nothing. Neither is it parched wastelands. At my core, there is love. I'll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever --- his strength, his intelligence, his kindness....
You don’t get it, do you? I said. It’s not a question of ‘what then’. Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that’s all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of...
You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. Sara looked directly into his eyes. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It wou...
When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it awa...
Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet v...