"Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust."

"I'm confused. Really confused. And it's a lot deeper than you think."

"True, given time enough, I can remember her face. I start joining images - her tiny, cold hand; her straight, black hair so smooth and cool to the touch; a soft, rounded earlobe and the microscopic mole just beneath it; the camel-hair coat she wore in the winter; her habit of looking straight into my eyes when asking a question; the slight trembling that would come to her voice now and then (as though she were speaking on a windy hilltop) - and suddenly her face is there, always in profile at first, because Naoko and I were always out walking together, side by side."

"I feel like Kizuki is reaching out for me from the darkness, calling to me, "Hey, Naoko, we can't stay apart.' When I hear him saying that, I don't know what to do."

"I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that's fine with me. I don't mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match."

"That's when I noticed she looked taller than usual. What was going on? I wondered: it was so strange! Did she have high heels on? Was she standing on something? I moved closer and was just about to speak to her again when I saw it: there was a rope above her head. It came straight down from a beam in the ceiling - I mean it was amazingly straight, like somebody had drawn a line in space with a ruler."

"Next door was a shop where a middle-aged, sleepy-eyed guy sold "adult toys." I couldn't imagine why anyone would want the kind of sex paraphernalia he had there, but he seemed to do a lot of business. In the alley diagonally across the from the record store I saw a drunken student vomiting. In the games centre across from us at another angle, the cook from a local eatery was killing his break time with a game of bingo that took cash bets. Beneath the eaves of a shop that had closed for the night, a dark-faced homeless guy was crouching, motionless. [....] Every fifteen minutes or so I would hear the siren of an ambulance or cop car. Three drunken company employees in suits and ties came by, laughing at the tops of their voices every time they yelled "Piece of ass!" at a pretty, long-haired girl in a telephone booth. The more I watched, the more mixed-up my head became. What the hell was this all about? I wondered. What could it possibly mean?"

"The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only. They floated over the earth in silence, carrying farm tools and baskets and some kind of sack."

"There were no loud voices and no whispers, no one laughing out loud or crying out in shock, no one yelling to another person with exaggerated gestures, nothing but quiet conversations, all carried on at the same level. People were eating in groups of three to five. Each group had a single speaker, to whom the others would listen with nods and grunts of interest, and when that person was done speaking, the next would take up the conversation. I could not tell what they were saying, but the way they said it reminded me of the strange tennis game I had seen at noon."

"What made [the houses] look strange it's hard to say, but that was the first thing I felt when I saw them. My reaction was a lot like what we feel from attempts to draw unreality in a pleasant way. It occurred to me that this was what you might get if Walt Disney did an animated version of a Munch painting."

"If I'm going to test myself, I want to do it in the biggest field there is - the nation. I want to see how high I can climb, how much power I can exercise in this insanely huge bureaucratic system." "Sounds like a game." "It is a game. I don't give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don't. I may be a selfish bastard, but I'm incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world." "And you have no use for 'ideals' I suppose?" "Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."

"You'll die with me?" Midori asked with shining eyes. "Hell, no," I said. "I'll run if it gets dangerous. If you want to die, you can do it alone." "Cold-hearted bastard!" "I'm not going to die with you just because you made lunch for me. Of course, if it had been dinner..."

"That's the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything's dark and you can't see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that, I couldn't stand it."

"Being able to say you don't have any money [is the best thing about being rich]. Like, if I suggested to a classmate we should do something, she could say, 'Sorry, I don't have any money.' Which is something I could never say if the situation was reversed. If I said 'I don't have any money,' it would really mean 'I don't have any money.' It's sad. Like if a pretty girl says 'I look terrible today, I don't want to go out,' that's O.K., but if an ugly girl says the same thing people laugh at her."

"A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do but what he should do."

"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment."

"[...] even if we hadn't met that day, my life might not have been any different. We had met that day because we were supposed to meet. If we hadn't met then and there, we would have just met somewhere else sometime."

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature, but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."

"Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined by now by so many others. People screamed there'd be revolutionary changes - which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the "changes" that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning."

"Just remember, life is a box of chocolates" I shook my head a few times and looked at her. "Maybe I'm not so smart, but sometimes I don't know what on earth you're talking about." "You know, they've got these cookie assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like,and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. 'Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK.' Life is a box of cookies." "I suppose you could call it a philosophy." "It's true, though. I've learned it from experience."

"I have to pay the price to go on living"

"Maybe what Hatsumi had said to me had had some effect: I could make myself feel far happier just thinking about Naoko than sleeping with some stupid, anonymous girl."

"Speaking of Midori, she sounds like an interesting person. Reading your letter, I got the feeling she might be in love with you. When I told that to Reiko, she said, "Well, of course she is! Even I am in love with Watanabe!'"

"When you start at zero, you've got a lot to learn."

"If you're in love with someone, can't you manage one way or another with her?" Hatsumi asked after a few moments' thought. "It's complicated."

"I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch."

"If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."

"And what is a revolution? It sure as hell isn't just changing the name on city hall."

"They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'?"

"But it's the working class that keep things running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that?"

"People are strange when you're a stranger."

"I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me."

"Only the dead stay seventeen forever."

"Lycoris- Yes."

"Albireo- But... That is no different from human beings."

"Lycoris- An extremely complicated system can function even with contradictions. And its results are contrary to expectations."

"Albireo- A program that contradicts cannot function."

"Lycoris- Morganna is contradicting herself."

"Lycoris- Morganna Mode Gone is God."

"Albireo- I thought God wanted to delete you?"

"Lycoris- I was fleeing from Morganna. Morganna told you where I was hiding. Morganna wanted to delete me."

"Albireo- I don't understand. What's Morganna?"

"Lycoris- That's right. I am an unwanted child. Even God doesn't want me."

"Albireo- God... tried to delete you?"

"Between Albireo and Lycoris:"

"(Harald) I'm sorry, Lycoris. You are a failure."