"Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”

Being loyal and staying faithful are considered one of my most important values. Playing with others' feelings and leading them on are most definitely not. Those who do so I find are the biggest morons and worth of punishment in hell. What I dislike most are people who are two faced; those who use others.

I am currently reading Socrates in Love by Kyoichi Katayama.





It is similar to One Litre of Tears, with the exception that the protagonist couple share a more close relationship. There is so much deep conversation in the novel. Here's an extract:

"Look, most people go through life thinking only of themselves, right?" I continued. "So long as they're eating good food and buying the things they want, they don't care about anybody else. But when you fall in love with someone, that person becomes more important to you than yourself. If we only had a little bit of food, I'd give mine to you. If we didn't have much money, I'd get you what you wanted and not buy anything for me. If something tasted good to you, that'd be enough for me. Because if you're happy, I'm happy too. That's what it means to love someone. What could be more important than that? Nothing. I think that someone who's found the ability to love has made a greater discovery than anything anyone's ever won a Nobel Prize for. And if people don't get that, or don't want to, then the human race can just go to hell. Go crash into another planet or something. And the sooner the better."
"Saku-chan," said Aki, trying to calm me down.
"People who think they're better than everyone else just because they're a little smarter are morons. They can just spend their whole lives studying, I say. Making money's the same thing. People who are good at making money should just go ahead and make money everyday. And then they should use that money to take care of us."
---
"I'm thinking about it all the time, why people came up with things like Heaven and the next world."
"Why did they?"
"Because someone they loved died, that's why."

This novel contains words about topics I cannot begin to articulate, but feel. I've experienced the death of someone dear to me, and whilst on the journey of grieving I pondered these same questions myself, and I still do. It's not all about death, either. It's about life itself. It's about the emotions that keep people together; emotions that keep the world together. I'm so glad somebody found the words to put together, because as much as I would have tried, I would have only been able to feel the emotions. This novel contains the truth and only the truth, and it's what makes me so interested in it. I highly recommend you give it a read; it's got better emotion and imagery than any movie or drama could ever express.