Maybe sometimes you just had to go out into the world and trust what would happen. You had to trust that there were good people in the world.

The thing about luck is that it’s like a fever. You can take fever meds and lie in bed and drink chicken broth and sleep seventeen hours in a row, but basically your fever will break when it wants to break.

Back in the car she said, “I think I die this year, maybe this month.” “I die first,” Jiichan replied. “Japanese women live to nineties.” “I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C.” “You drink more green tea. You live longer.

My mother did not think mustaches were feminine. I don’t know why.

And yet we couldn’t leave – it was if the rocks were holding us there. I mean, they were only rocks. But for some reason, those rocks made lonely feel good.

I was worried that her spirit was watching me every time I cried. I was worried that if she saw me crying, she would be very unhappy and maybe she wouldn’t be able to leave the earth the way she was supposed to. So even though I wanted her to keep watching me, I wished she would forget about me and never see my crying and never worry about me anymore, even if that meant I was now alone.

Nothing wrong with gullible. How you be happy if not gullible?

Here at the sea – especially at the sea – I could hear my sister’s voice in the waves: “Kira-kira! Kira-kira!

I didn’t care if I was a genius or if I was pretty or if I was good in sports. I just liked to listen to Lynn and to talk to Bera-Bera and to eat rice candies.

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing.