After the Quake: Stories

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself,”

‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’ ”

“Well, you know what else they say: ‘Where there’s blood, there’s a hard-on.’ ”

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

This life is nothing but a short, painful dream.

She repeated the words in her mind: When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not. Then she curled herself against him and dropped into a fleeting, but deep, sleep.

“The trouble is, I don’t have a damn thing to do with anything fifty thousand years ago—or fifty thousand years from now, either. Nothing. Zip. What’s important is now. Who knows when the world is gonna end? Who can think about the future? The only thing that matters is whether I can get my stomach full right now and get it up right now. Right?”

To understand something and to put that something into a form you can see with your own eyes are two completely different things. If you could manage to do both equally well, though, living would be a lot simpler

It was the first time that Junko felt a certain “something” as she watched the flames of a bonfire: “something” deep down, a “wad” of feeling, she might have called it, because it was too raw, too heavy, too real to be called an idea. It coursed through her body and vanished, leaving behind a sweet-sad, chest-gripping, strange sort of feeling. For a time after it had gone, she had gooseflesh on her arms.

it was all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?

I could never live with this man, she thought. I could never get inside his heart. But I might be able to die with him.