Quotes from Banana Yoshimoto

It's a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you're never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild.

Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.

Chilled-looking people walking along the riverside, the snow beginning, faintly, to pile up on the roofs of cars, the bare trees shaking their heads left and right, dry leaves tossing in the wind. The silver of the metal window sash sparkling coldly. Soon after, I heard sensei call, "Mikage! Are you awake? It's snowing, look! It's snowing!" "I'm coming!" I called out, standing up. I got dressed to begin another day. Over and over, we begin again.

I should have told her at the time. I could have taken a deep breath, looked away, and forced myself to say it.

You know, Chihiro, darling- all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me.

A lover should die after a long lifetime. I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped. The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn't bring it back. It was impossible to see the world as I had before. My brain ebbed and flowed, unstable, and I passed the days in a relentless state of dull oppression.

Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?

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.

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity.

I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.

Of course, it's true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you're feeling down the the landscape seems darker too - you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don't change. They existed, and that's all there is to it.

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

The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.

If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we're doing is really love, I'd be so tremendously relieved...

You have to take responsibility for listening.

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words once they are spoken or written. It was then that I first felt a deep curiosity about language, and understood it as a tool that encompasses both a single moment and eternity.

The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.

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

If people I don't care for are attracted to me, I accept it as the wages of beauty.

He was quiet in the way people are when they believe the world would get along just fine without them.

I had been walking in silence for so long,I had almost forgotten what my own voice sounded like.My knees were tired;my toes were beginning to ache.

We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it's more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did- but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don't mean this in the fatalistic sense; we're constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct.

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