And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

‘It is as evil as we are positive … the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive.… The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint o

The sun begins to sink. It is time for the cats to come. He knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place

Nobody’s easier to fool, Ushikawa thought, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

“everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority.

point. It teaches me something—or tries to. People need things like that to go on living—mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can’t explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things. That’s what I think.

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?