Breasts And Eggs Quotes
"If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had."
"For poor people, window size isn’t even a concept. Nobody has a view."
"You only know what it means to be poor, or have the right to talk about it, if you’ve been there yourself."
"My life was like a dusty shelf in an old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages."
"Once you get your period, that means your body can fertilize sperm. And that means you can get pregnant."
"Life is hard enough with just one body. Why would anyone ever want to make another one?"
"Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy."
"Happiness is the base unit of consciousness, our single greatest motivator."
"Everything gets dark, and that darkness fills my eyes more and more. I don’t want to keep them open."
"It’s like everything is moving all these parts. It’s funny. It’s like I’m in there, somewhere inside myself."
"Life is tough, but you gotta keep living until you die, you know what I mean? Sometimes you just need to escape, from your own life."
"For some people, though, that kind of escape isn’t enough. They never want to come back to themselves, so they decide to not live anymore."
"Most people can’t, though. So they drink all the time and try to make it go away."
"Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work."
"I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do."
"Honestly, I know nothing about geography, but I pointed in the general direction of where I thought it was."
"I owe Maki the world. After Mom and Komi died, when it was just the two of us, Maki took care of everything."
"It’s not like I’d ever picked grapes before. I didn’t know what I was missing. I mean, I didn’t even like grapes."
"So why was I crying? I still wonder about that. Who the hell cares about grapes anyway?"
"Sometimes you get little ones in there, too. As soon as you open your hand, though, they roll off, one at a time."
"I knew they weren’t even real grapes. It’s not like I could eat them, but that’s all that I can think about when someone mentions picking grapes."
"The light leaking between the clouds was touched with purples, gentle reds and heavy blues."
"I bet once I made a mess Makiko would come home anyway."
"The summer night was tinged with moisture. The air smelled like rain."
"I don’t know what to do, and you don’t tell me anything. I love you, but I never want to be like you."
"I’m not talking about people dying or being murdered or anything, but right now there are people out there going through all kinds of hell."
"You hear that, Natsuko? The truth? What’s she want me to say? Can you translate?"
"I’m fine on my own. It’s fine, but what about you?"
"Hey, we never got to do the fireworks last night. I’ll keep them for you, okay? Somewhere safe and dry."
"When someone gets one stroke of luck, just one moment. But that first kind of luck is something different, right? It’s the kind you can count on—it’s strong, it lasts."
"It just made me so uneasy, and I couldn’t make the feeling go away. Lying naked on the mattress, I felt like I could see black spirals coming from the ceiling."
"We could talk about anything else, and if I had something to say, I knew that he would listen."
"It’s like they were all members of a club that I could never join."
"Her face had been blurred out. Her hair was shoulder length and dark brown. She wore a white cardigan over a gingham shirt."
"I wasn’t that serious about it, not at first. I guess part of me didn’t even think it was possible, to get pregnant like that."
"But I didn’t have any other options. I was out of time. No matter what I had to do to make it happen, I wanted my own baby."
"Why do it? To help out. It’s as simple as that."
"Here’s this woman, and she’s in need, right? I want to help, and if there’s something I can do, why wouldn’t I?"
"Anyway, first and foremost, I wanted to help, to do whatever I could to make that woman happy."
"Infertility treatment using third-party sperm had been happening in Japan for over sixty years."
"The men were volunteers: they would allow for you to cover travel expenses or buy them a cup of coffee but drew the line there."
"One day, a woman in her late thirties who wants to have a child meets a man at a cafe to pick up sperm."
"She gets pregnant on the second try, and gives birth, as a single mother."
"I’m glad I did it. Truly. My child means the world to me. I’m so happy I went through with it—that much I never questioned."
"Meet some total stranger at a cafe and go home with a vial of sperm he’s just filled in the bathroom."
"Just the idea of a strange man’s sperm inside my body was too much to imagine."
"Why add a child to the picture? The idea was absurd, no matter how you slice it."
"I can’t even imagine what my life would be like . . . If I hadn’t done this."
"At the end of the day, it’s pointless speculating what a kid might think. There’s no way to know ahead of time. I’ll do everything I can so that my kid is happy they were born."
"Right, Christmas . . . I’d been sitting almost the whole day, but my arms and legs were spent."
"Every customer got three free karaoke songs, and as a kind of an hors d’oeuvre, we served cold chicken on silver paper plates."
"The whole staff would come in for the three days leading up to Christmas to spruce up the shop."
"I could see people all around me, but I almost felt like nobody could see me."
"I walked home wondering how many years had passed since I had done anything on Christmas."
"This is the day that someone finally understood how kind you truly are."
"I’m not sure I’m a real novelist, to be honest."
"What if something big happens, tomorrow, and everything changes? What if I got pregnant?"
"Life became so complicated for me once I found out. Of course, it’s not like everything was simple before. But things changed."
"It doesn’t matter what I do. It never feels real. It just feels like I’m only half there."
"Sometimes it makes me wonder what I’m trying to achieve."
"The fact that I was sitting there with the person who wrote those words felt so strange to me."
"Everyone in my family has worked in bars, me included. Maybe that has something to do with it."
"It’s so easy to talk to you. Maybe it’s because we’re the same age."
"Here I am, giving you my whole life story, when I wish I’d asked for yours."
"The older I get, the clearer it is. Savory is the way to go."
"Don’t worry about it. That man’s got nothing to do with us."
"I want to know them, this child, whoever they are."
"The struggle means something. It means everything."
"You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born."
"What if you have a child, and that child wishes with every bone in her body that she’d never been born?"
"You’re betting that the child you bring into this world will be at least as happy as you’ve been."
"It’s always about them. They’re only thinking about themselves."
"Life is both good and bad, but the majority of people think it’s mostly good."
"It’s not the sort of thing Sengawa would want."
"Everything about it was smaller than I remember, everything about it."
"It was like a dream, I told myself. Only it made me feel hopelessly depressed."
"That wasn’t how my body worked. That part of me, the part I had just touched, it wasn’t made for that."
"I wasn’t sure if it was moving. Our cabin didn’t rock at all, but we were rising."
"The water was a dark gray, something between ash and lead, striated by gentle waves."
"I guess sometimes the sand isn’t exactly white, but there’s plenty of it."
"I used to go on ferris wheels all the time, with my dad."
"At that distance, if you said hello to someone on the phone, it’d take a day and a half for their response to reach you."
"They’re still out there, the size of cows, floating through space 12 billion miles away."
"Hurtling through total darkness, toward Sagittarius."
"We’re always getting caught up in our problems, but what’s 100 years?"
"People are strange, Jun. They know nothing lasts forever, but still find time to laugh and cry."
"As if I’m stuck being the way I am because I’ll never find this man."
"I would’ve told him that it didn’t change the way I felt, that he was still my dad."
"You can only visit the family so many times."
"It’s almost like I’m dressed up as a cartoon version of myself."
"Like noodles in a pot of boiling water. Pretty soon they spread and fill the pot."
"This is the closest that I’ve been to death in my whole life."
"Eyes wide open. I reached out and tried to touch its brilliance."
"She was new to me. Her voice rang through her body, loud as anything."