Tobacco’s a killer,” Kafuku said. “Being alive is a killer, if you think about it,” Misaki said.
The silence lent a faint weight to the air. As though I were sitting alone, at the bottom of the sea.
Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
I couldn’t be sure if I had moved forward or fallen behind, or if I was just circling over the same spot.
The total amount of time available is especially limited. The clock is ticking as we speak. Time rushes past. Opportunities are lost right and left. If you have money, you can buy time. You can even buy freedom if you want. Time and freedom: those are the most important things that people can buy with money.
I get out of bed, go over to the window, and look at the night sky. And think about time that can never be regained. I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.
You have to overcome the fear and anger inside you,” the boy named Crow says. “Let a bright light shine in and melt the coldness in your heart. That’s what being tough is all about. Do that and you really will be the toughest fifteen-year-old on the planet. You following me? There’s still time. You can still get your self back. Use your head. Think about what you’ve got to do. You’re no dunce. You should be able to figure it out.
It’s a waste of time to think about things you can’t know, and things you can’t confirm even if you know them.
Eyes mark the shape of the city.
Whenever I wake up in a strange house I always feel as if the wrong soul got stuffed into the wrong body.
I know I’m a little different from everyone else, but I’m still human being. That’s what I’d like you to realize. I’m just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way. Sometimes, though, that small difference feels like an abyss. But I guess there’s not much I can do about it.
So this was how secrets got started, I thought to myself. People constructed them little by little. I had not intended to keep May Kasahara a secret from Kumiko. My relationship with her was not that big a deal, finally: whether I mentioned it or not was of no consequence. Once it had flown down a certain delicate channel, however, it had become cloaked in the opacity of secretiveness, whatever my original “intention” had have been.
Like a blind dolphin, the night of the new moon silently drew near.
I was desperately clinging to a scrap of wood that had been swept away. In pitch-black darkness, not a single star, or the moon, visible in the sky. As long as I clung to that piece of wood I wouldn’t drown, but I had no clue where I was, where I was heading.
There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.
Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going – people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward.
One day, I lost sight of her. I happened to glance away for a moment, and when I turned back, she had disappeared.
No need to worry. Time is the remedy for your concerns. It is the key for all things that possess form. True, time does not last forever, but as long as you have it, it is remarkably efficacious. So look forward to the future, my friends.
No matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.
If this was a dream, then the world I’m living in itself must all be a dream.