They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.

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It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us

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Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty.

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People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

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I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

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Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.

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In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.

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A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

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Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words.

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Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

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