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

love doesn't ever have to stop. It's like the national water system, I thought. No matter how long you leave the faucets running, you can be sure the supply won't give out.

Cat out of the bag?”

Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too

suddenly I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and stay perfectly still, and once again the knowledge that this work was leading me to an inescapable, but certainly not unhappy, parting—a natural separation—would gush into me. And every time this happened I would realize that this feeling wasn’t quite suffering, no, but a kind of distress that was at the same time wonderfully exciting.

Though we weren’t aware of it, we were all struggling to conceal the murky snarl of emotions that must actually have slept deep inside each one of us.

Life is a performance, I thought

Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realization swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendor of light, if only for an instant.