• A breezy novella chock-full of love and loss and compassion. Dripping with beauty.
• There is something very sweet, almost ineffable, to the moments of tension between her love for Yuichi and the pathos of a soul tested by trauma and suffering. She sees the fallibility of it all but if she is to choose a path, she wants the one with him in it.
• Awareness of death is how she gives herself life and knows real joy. With loss, you see just how precious the human heart is. She also realizes, as Eriko does, that “the world does not exist for my benefit.”
• Kept thinking of this toward end - https://music.apple.com/us/album/together-special-edition/1578454633?i=1578454822
• We’re bound to suffer and if not pushed to the brink, won’t move. The fight not to let her spirit be destroyed when she bottoms out, and – though the road is dark and lonely – to light her own path, is the real test of the soul.
• “Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by "their happiness" is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone.”
• “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 that 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.”
• “I held the feeling in my heart; the urge to discuss it died out. There was all the time in the world. In the endless repetition of other nights, other mornings, this moment, too, might become a dream.”