Don't read anything into these. The passages here are just some I found and really liked, and wanted to save in case I never get a copy of this book...Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. Note that "Sputnik" means "traveling companion"

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbitsof these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But it was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
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Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?
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If people aren't equal, where would you fit in?
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Being all alone is the feeling you get when you stand at the mouth of a large river, on a rainy evening and watch the water flow into the sea. Have you ever done that?
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I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren't any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside.