All the Lovers in the Night

“So what good is reliance when everything could fall apart because of some little bump or a change in the wind? That’s not how trust works, though, at least not for me. With trust, I’m always giving something back for what I get. There’s a balance.”

“It’s like they say, trust is a two-way street. Reliance can be one-sided, though. Know what I mean? One side depends on the other. That’s not a partnership. And that’s why relationships based on reliance are pretty unstable. One little hiccup and everything could disappear.”

“Um, do you think the light you’re thinking about and the light I’m talking about are, um, the same thing?”

“Of course they are,” Mitsutsuka said with a smile. “We’re talking about the same light.”

I thought about the walk I took that winter on my birthday.

I remembered that night, how I counted the lights, walking through coldness so profound that I could almost hear it, through that dry air slickened with so many special things

question of greatness definitely matters, if we’re thinking about where our salaries are coming from, but as far as our work is concerned, it makes no difference. Because all manuscripts are equally fair in the eyes of the proofreader,”

proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people.”

Every birthday since, I’ve gone out for a walk at night.

That’s why what matters is how you think about your work in your own lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard you’re trying.

t this point in life, I know better than to expect anything from men.

Nine winters ago—on the night of my twenty-fifth birthday, at a little after eleven, I decided to go out for a walk.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea, but as I sat there, watching yet another uneventful birthday coming to an end, I had the sudden desire to go out and walk around. Sure, it would probably have been nice to bring a cake home (my birthday is Christmas Eve, so the city was full of cakes), or have a conversation with somebody, but going for a walk was the only thing that came to mind that I could do on my own