Banana Yoshimoto Quotes

...there's nothing wrong with being a little hopeful. Who says you can't warm your frozen limbs in the faint heat of a flicker of hope?

Nakajima’s past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That’s what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.

Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.

And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more ...

I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing people are flesh. Flesh and water.

When people start getting depressed there’s just no end to it—things just seem to get worse and worse.

Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too — that's just the way things work.

Things are just things. They can't bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.

My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.

A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness. It's only natural, when two separate universes touch.

I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.

It was the truth. I felt a yearning love for every instant that passed.

Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you...

My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.

I wished my heart would break and get it over with.

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.

Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.

I can't imagine a life without a story.

I didn't care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything– it didn't matter. I felt close to him, and I'd come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.

Nakajima's presence didn't put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.

Love is love. It doesn't matter what kind it is.

I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.