black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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

Country Grow Up Moving
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.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Farewell Goodbye Sky
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

Days Long Missing Ordinary
I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Feelings Love People Rhythm Travel
This is what it means to be loved… when someone wants to touch you, to be tender.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Mean Someone Tender Want
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!)” (p. 3).
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Broken Kitchen Light
The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Body Daily Life Ritual
Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Breeze Dream Ocean Sea
I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn’t up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Benefits Ratio World
You know, Chihiro, darling- all it takes is one little wrong step and you end up feeling frustrated your whole life, like me.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Feelings Frustrated Littles
Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Inspirational Life Love
Nothing exists in this world but me and my bed…” (p. 141).
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Bed Exist Nothing World
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

Blue Eye Night
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.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Handle Memories Stills
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

Adults Despair Mean
In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one’s life history is etched in the senses.
BANANA YOSHIMOTO

Emotion Flow Sense Uncertain

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Banana Yoshimoto Quotes