Banana Yoshimoto

Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more—it’s sad, but that’s the truth.

all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life

If you’re always angry, always yelling at people, ultimately that just means you depend on them

love doesn't ever have to stop. It's like the national water system, I thought. No matter how long you leave the faucets running, you can be sure the supply won't give out.

I don’t know why it has to be you, of all people. But for some reason I can’t help thinking that of all the people around me, only you can really read the meanings of the words I use, and understand what I’m saying

But now the warehouse is empty. I’m really hurting now

see all kinds of different things as we grow up. And with each instant that passes we change into something new. We keep moving forward, and as we move we keep being confronted by this fact, over and over again, in many different ways. But if there were one thing that I wanted to hold on to even with this knowledge, to retain just as it was, it would be this evening. I didn’t need anything else, I didn’t need anything more—that’s how happy we were then

Cat out of the bag?”

Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too

suddenly I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and stay perfectly still, and once again the knowledge that this work was leading me to an inescapable, but certainly not unhappy, parting—a natural separation—would gush into me. And every time this happened I would realize that this feeling wasn’t quite suffering, no, but a kind of distress that was at the same time wonderfully exciting.