Banana Yoshimoto Quotes

She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.

I suppose that's the reason I believe that as long as there is someone in charge of the household, someone who can maintain order among its members, someone who is clearly mature and established as a person, someone, in other words, like my mother, then eventually all who live under the same roof, despite blood ties or lineage, will at one point become family. Such a simple idea, but one that took a while for me to catch on to.Oh, and another thing.If the same people don't spend enough time in a home, even if they are connected by blood, their bonds will slowly fade away like a familiar landscape.

Banana Yoshimoto

We've done so much together, wherever I go and whatever I see, I think of you. Newborn babies; the pattern on the plate that you can see under a paper-thin slice of sashimi; fireworks in August. The moon hidden behind the clouds over the ocean at night. When I'm sitting down someplace, inadvertently stepping on someone's toes, and have to apologize. And when someone picks up something I've dropped, and I thank him. When I see an elderly man tottering along,and wonder how much longer he has to live. Dogs and cats peeking out from alleyways. A beautiful view from a tall building. The warm blast of air you feel when you go down into a subway station. The phone ringing in the middle of the night. Even when I have crushes on other men, I always see you in the curve of their eyebrows.""Yet I must remain calm, detached. It's a little like trying to ignore a plate of delicious food when you're really hungry. When it beckons you, there's no problem with enjoying the aroma and appreciating it with your eyes, but at some point you have to separate yourself and realize, like a professional waiter does, that it's not your own. It's my job to ignore those plates heaped with delicious morsels and just carry them where they need to go.

Banana Yoshimoto

It was the truth. I felt a yearning love for every instant that passed.

Banana Yoshimoto

When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening.

Banana Yoshimoto

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. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild.

Banana Yoshimoto

It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.

Banana Yoshimoto

Love is love. It doesn't matter what kind it is.

Banana Yoshimoto

I used to think that people are were supposed to be more strange, and dirty, and full of all sorts of emotions, pity and nobility, with infinite layers of complications.

Banana Yoshimoto

I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

Banana Yoshimoto

Actually, time had always been passing. I had just managed to avoid thinking about it very much. It would be hard for me to recapture that feeling—life wasn’t so easy anymore. Small things pricked my heart. In those early days, I lived in a world of overwhelming sensations; it was like I had just fallen out of love.

Banana Yoshimoto

The only thing I’d understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.

Banana Yoshimoto

it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night

Banana Yoshimoto

That's the advantage of insomnia. People who go to be early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done

Banana Yoshimoto

It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.

Banana Yoshimoto

Nakajima's presence didn't put any pressure on me, either. Quite the opposite: there was a warmth in the core of my chest when he was around.

Banana Yoshimoto

I didn't care whether I had gotten dressed, or what state my hair was in or anything– it didn't matter. I felt close to him, and I'd come to regard him as just another part of the scenery.

Banana Yoshimoto

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. Where tile catching the light (ting! Ting!)

Banana Yoshimoto

I can't imagine a life without a story.

Banana Yoshimoto

Things that don't matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.

Banana Yoshimoto

I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately i couldn't protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered.Live like a flower. You have that right. It's something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And it's enough.

Banana Yoshimoto

We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in the fatalistic sense; we’re constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Banana Yoshimoto

There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you can’t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that.

Banana Yoshimoto

I wished my heart would break and get it over with.

Banana Yoshimoto

My fury was lofty, pure, cool. It was an emotion that none of these people, struggling so hard to impose a shape on life when life has no shape, could begin to understand.

Banana Yoshimoto

Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you...

Banana Yoshimoto

I see two lovers looking over the edge of the cauldron of hell. Are they contemplating a double suicide? This means their love will end in hell.' I couldn't stop laughing.

Banana Yoshimoto

I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go. One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.

Banana Yoshimoto

As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.

Banana Yoshimoto

There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water.

Banana Yoshimoto

I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.

Banana Yoshimoto

A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness. It's only natural, when two separate universes touch.

Banana Yoshimoto

We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.

Banana Yoshimoto

My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.

Banana Yoshimoto

Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.

Banana Yoshimoto

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.

Banana Yoshimoto

Things are just things. They can't bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.

Banana Yoshimoto

Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too — that's just the way things work.

Banana Yoshimoto

The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.

Banana Yoshimoto

To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.

Banana Yoshimoto

I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.

Banana Yoshimoto

When people start getting depressed there’s just no end to it—things just seem to get worse and worse.

Banana Yoshimoto

Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.

Banana Yoshimoto

The days I’d passed with my mom before she died were still there, it seemed, seared into the corners of my heart.The atmosphere of the station brought it all back. I could see myself running to the hospital, glad to be seeing my mother again. You never know you’re happy until later. Because physical sensations like smells and exhaustion don’t figure into our memories, I guess. Only the good bits bob up into view.I was always startled by the snatches of memory that I saw as happy, how they came.This time, it was the feeling I got when I stepped out onto the platform. The sense of what it had been like to be on my way to see my mom, for her still to be alive, if only for the time being, if only for that day. The happiness of that knowledge had come back to life inside me.And the loneliness of that moment. The helplessness.

Banana Yoshimoto

If a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is.

Banana Yoshimoto

It didn't matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.

Banana Yoshimoto

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.

Banana Yoshimoto

But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it.

Banana Yoshimoto

I saw the sky and sea and sand and the flickering flames of the bonfire through my tears. All at once, it rushed into my head with tremendous speed, and made me feel dizzy. It was beautiful. Everything that happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.

Banana Yoshimoto

I was kind of tired, I guess, of knowing people are flesh. Flesh and water.

Banana Yoshimoto

I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.

Banana Yoshimoto

And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more ...

Banana Yoshimoto

Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.

Banana Yoshimoto

The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twist of DNA, like the vast universe.

Banana Yoshimoto

Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.

Banana Yoshimoto

Just being with Nakajima made me feel as if we were detached from history, and had no particular age.

Banana Yoshimoto

We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, 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 smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.

Banana Yoshimoto

Nakajima’s past would always be there, so the foundation could crumble at any moment. That’s what happens, I realized, when people destroy other people.

Banana Yoshimoto

I never tell my boyfriend that I'm busy when I'm not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don't agree with me. So it's always okay, it's always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.

Banana Yoshimoto

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