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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.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

That's what the world is , after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here.' Tengo shook his head. 'I don't think so. This way is just fine. This is exactly the right time. For both of us. [...] We needed that much time.... to understand how lonely we really were.

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.

Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish.

Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.

It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

Please remember: things are not what they seem.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.