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

you’re gonna startle me out of my wits

I’ll head back now

You’ve got a sturdy spirit and you’ve got guts—even if you were to end up spending your entire life here you’d get to see more than all these bozos who make trips around the world. That’s the sort of feeling I get from you.”

The faraway sparkle in their eyes seemed like it must make everyone who glimpsed it think back on something precious, call up the pleasant ache of a reviving memory, like a dream dreamt long ago.

you got the feeling she must have sped up the pace of her life somehow, that she was fighting to cram more life into each passing moment.

the way light glimmers through a hole in a cloud

You feel really lonely when someone keeps coming and going all the time. And I had a hunch that somehow the loneliness I suffered in my father’s absence contained a vague shadow of death