The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

Time may pass, but the memory of the people we've loved doesn't grow old. It is only we who age.

It isn't just the best things that come to an end, but also the worst.

Love is like therapy, it only works when you believe in it.

Later, Yui realized she had learned another important thing in that place of confinement: that silencing a man was equivalent to erasing him forever. And so it was important to tell stories, to talk to people, to talk about people. To listen to people talking about other people. Even to speak with the dead, if it helped.

Yui knew that the strongest kind of love is the kind that is taken for granted.

There was no addition or subtraction in life that did not require some time for adjustment.

love is a miracle. Even the second time around, even when it comes to you by mistake.

As children we see happiness as a thing. A toy train sticking out of a basket or the plastic film around a slice of cake. or a photograph of a scene in which we are at the centre, all eyes on us. As adults it gets more complicated. Happiness is success, work, a man or a woman. All vague, laborious things. Whether it's a word we use to describe our lives or not, it is mostly just that, a word. Childhood taught us something different about happiness, Yui thought, that all you needed to do was reach out your hand in the right direction and you could grasp it.

Every week had been a struggle; every month simply hours stacked up in the attic, for a future that might never arrive.

being loved comes with enormous responsibilities, at least as enormous as those of loving.

Anyone who has experienced great grief wonders at some point which is more difficult, learning or unlearning. There was a time when Yui wouldn't have been able to say, but now she was sure it was the second.

A famous citation from the American psychotherapist Virginia Satir (1916-1988) reads: 'We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. And we need twelve hugs a day for growth.

A man once told me that death is a very personal thing...' Suzuki-san said. 'To some extent, we try to build our lives exactly like everyone else's. But not death. Everyone reacts to death in their own way...

Knowing how to love life is a necessity, Takeshi, and she needs to learn to trust people. Not to hate them, there’s no way out of hate.

Yui and Takeshi gradually realised that the Wind Phone was like a verb that conjugated differently for each person: everybody's grief looked the same at first but was, ultimately, unique.

She [Yui] was convinced that nostalgia had nothing to do with memory, that we actually feel it most strongly for things we have never experienced.

And when happiness is a thing, anything that threatens its safety is the enemy.

Takeshi and Yui agreed that the things you end up missing most about somebody when they're gone are their flaws: the most ridiculous or annoying things. 'I wonder,' said Takeshi, 'whether it's because you had such a hard time accepting those things at first that now it's impossible to forget them.

The superficial knowledge of a subject is often more harmful than absolute ignorance.

Sometimes she cried, sometimes she laughed, because life could still be funny, even after a tragedy.

life decays, countless cracks form over time. But it was those very cracks, the fragility, that determined a person’s story; that made them want to keep going, to find out what happens next.

Grief, Yui had once told him, is something you ingest every day, like a sandwich cut into small pieces, gently chewed and then calmly swallowed. Digestion was slow. And so, Takeshi thought, joy must work the same way.

Yui concluded that memories were like objects, like the soccer ball that was found on the coast of Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.

It was the right moment. It always is when something beautiful happens.

Yui developed her own theory: that for some people, life started loosening their joints when they were still in the cradle, and they had to work hard to hold the pieces together. She imagined those people juggling a bundle of limbs, ears, feet, and kidneys in their arms, like parts of the game Operation. But then, at some point, something would slot into place: they'd fall in love, start a family, get a well-paid job, a nice career, and they would begin to feel more stable. The truth was, though, they were just giving out parts of themselves to relatives and trusted friends; they were learning that it was normal not to be able to cope on your own, and that asking people for help was the only way forward if there were other things they wanted to do with their lives. They had to depend on others. And then? Then what would happen? That's where Yui believed luck came into it. Because if those people lost someone who had been looking after a fundamental piece of them, they would never be able to regain their balance. The harmony would be gone, along with their loved one.

fragility does not reside in things so much as in flesh. An object can be repaired or replaced, but the body cannot. Perhaps it is stronger than the soul, which once broken can remain so forever, but it is weaker than wood, lead, or iron.

It was an act of pure faith to pick up the receiver, dial a number, to be answered by a wall of silence and speak anyway. Fatih was the key to it all.

Being afraid of life and of people only makes you weaker.

A person can never have too many hugs.

But then she remembered a line, or even half a line, she had read in a book on raising children. She recalled it very clearly because it had unsettled her. It said that distance makes us love better and with greater respect. That distance wasn't, in fact, a bad thing. On the contrary, it was the lack of distance that could be harmful, and only the purest emotion, spontaneous and visceral love, was capable of healing a wound. Ah so, she remembered thinking, love is dangerous. And yet it's essential.