“That’s right. Your heart is seeking, and needing, a new direction. Though your mind has yet to fully grasp that. People’s hearts are not that easy to grasp.”

there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.

Nowadays, though, anyone can check what day of the week they were born on in less than ten seconds. The boy could come up with the answer in one second. This wasn’t a shootout in a Western, but how much practical difference was there between ten seconds and one? I felt a little sad for the boy. The world was, day by day, becoming a more convenient,

Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.

I’d forgotten that tears could be this warm. Tears, like blood, were wrung from the same warm body.

Sometimes numbers can be more eloquent than words.

My forty-fifth birthday came, and not long after this none-too-happy milepost, I once again fell into a hole.

This might be one of the issues with eternity—not knowing where you should go next. But how much value was there in a love that didn’t seek the eternal?

I cooked my meals for myself, worked out at the gym, kept everything nice and neat around me, and when I had free time, I read. Regularity is key to a single life—even if at times it was hard to draw a line between regularity and tedium.