337 Quotes by Banana Yoshimoto

On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t. Without even noticing what you’re doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you – you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead.

I’d assumed that once I’d passed the age of twenty, I’d gained the power to do everything alone. But I’d been wrong about that, and this just brought it home to me, again, that I still had a long way to go.

In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.

That’s because you think about everything in words... You can go around and around the same question all you like, and never find an answer. I know that’s how you cope, how you get through time, so I’ve never thought it was immature, or unhelpful. But there’s another way of doing it: to sit with an empty space, and just look at it, without thinking anything, just enduring. Some people can do that.

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.

No matter how dreamlike a love I have found myself in, no matter how delightfully drunk I have been, in my heart I was always aware that my family consisted of only one other person. The space that cannot be filled, no matter how cheerfully a child and an old person are living together – the deathly silence that, panting in a corner of the room, pushes its way in like a shudder. I felt it very early, although no one told me about it.

May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm, bright place drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.

And it’s true, I thought, interesting things do happen, even in the midst of the blackest nights. And when you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand.

Listen kiddo, by the time you grow up you’ll have collected a whole lot of this ‘dirt of life’ stuff, right, you won’t know where it’s coming from but it’ll pile up, and clothes and pearls won’t look as beautiful to you as they do now – that’s for sure. The problem is that dirt, see? You can’t ever settle down in one place, you’ve got to live like you’re always, always staring way off into the distance.