Goodbye Tsugumi Quotes
"Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too—that's just the way things work."
"It's a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent."
"People never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back—that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is."
"All the little knots that the years had put in our lives came undone, and we began to function as a proper family."
"The vegetables in Tokyo are awful, right, and the seafood is so gross you can hardly stand to eat it. But it turns out that the senbei here are great—it’s the one food this city can really be proud of."
"The breeze that was blowing and the expressions on people’s faces seemed slightly tired, tired in precisely the same way."
"Life is a performance. Perhaps the word 'illusion' would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me 'performance' seemed closer to the truth."
"Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten."
"We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves."
"I'm using every ounce of my energy to try to put together a new life with you and your mother."
"We had been in such a bizarre situation that we ended up acting like characters in just the opposite scenario, as gentle and good as the members of some Typical Happy Family."
"It occurs to me that perhaps this is what people mean by 'nostalgia': the pain of knowing that this powerful yearning will eventually fade."
"The senbei for my mother remained on the table after everything else had been cleared away, an unobtrusive symbol of our family's happiness."
"No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider."
"All of a sudden I realized that sometime after that night, at some unknowable point along the way, I had grown up."
"But nights like this are long. They continue forever, glittering like a jewel."
"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."
"The knowledge that as long as I went on living I would always have chances to feel these nights made it possible for me to have hope for the future."
"You spend a little while talking and everyone starts to feel this conviction, you’re all equally sure that you’re at the beginning of something good. That’s how it is when you meet people you’re going to be with for a long time."
"Love is the kind of thing that’s already happening by the time you notice it, that’s how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn’t change."
"Being able to go anywhere isn’t the point. Hey, it’s nice here, too. You can wander around in your sandals, wander around in your bathing suit, and you’ve got the mountains and the ocean. You’ve got a sturdy spirit and you’ve got guts—even if you were to end up spending your entire life here you’d get to see more than all these bozos who make trips around the world."
"Love where there’s an end in sight and love where there isn’t. People in love understand that better than anyone. When there’s no end in sight, it means you’re headed for something huge."
"The only reason Aunt Masako remained so unperturbed was that she’d grown accustomed to having Tsugumi put her through all sorts of misery like this."
"The only reason I’ve managed to live this long, and the reason my skin is so fair, and the reason I’m able to relish my food as much as I do is that Maria here fusses over me so!"
"No matter how many times we get together I never get sick of being with him, and every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face. That’s how much I like him."
"This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next—and I didn’t want to forget a single one."
"Right around the time when the hustle and bustle of preparations for the festival take ahold of the town, all of a sudden you find yourself noticing that autumn has begun weaving itself into the rhythm of your days."
"Feverish eyes see a world in limbo, one that soars up aggressively. Your heart flaps around with a lightness that balances the heaviness of your body, and your thoughts keep getting tangled up again and again in unfamiliar ideas."
"It’s impossible to remember the air of a festival night—you have to wait until a festival actually rolls around to get it back."
"Friends from elementary school, junior high, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories."
"We see all kinds of different things as we grow up. And with each instant that passes we change into something new."
"The contented smile that lit up her face seemed as pure and rare as the final flurry of spring snow on a mountaintop."
"The realization that Tsugumi was constantly running around in a state like the one I was in now hit me with a new strength, and I felt a swell of emotion."
"Summer is almost over. This knowledge left us a little quieter than before."
"You simply won’t be able to get along in life if you’re going to do stuff like that!"
"It’s like I’ve turned into a boring twit of a cliché, just another damn wispy bedridden girl."
"Every time I thought about all this, an image of Tsugumi sitting with a wide smile on her face, holding the dog that looked just like Gongorō in her arms, flickered across the surface of my mind like a burst of warm sunlight."
"Of course school was packed with people like that, still muddle-headed from the effects of summer vacation."
"For me the summer had been the concentrated essence of everything in the past that I loved and missed."
"I could hear a clamor of voices on the other end of the line, names being called out over a microphone, the screams of children crying."
"Every morning an ugly nurse comes and opens my curtains."