[...]one should act as if the things he cherished the most were already lost or broken.

Their forces equal in a kind of match Shigure had never been in before, the kind of match where your opponent wanted you to win while you wished for nothing other than to die at his hands.

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.

Anyhow, I get distracted a lot," she repeated.

She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry. She couldn't soothe herself by saying: this is just a pause, life will come afterwards like a wave of blood, washing over me, moistening my parched wood. She couldn't fool herself because she knew she was also living and that those moments were the peak of something difficult, of a painful experience for which she should be thankful: almost as if she were feeling time outside herself, in a detached manner.

There are, of course, the people who revolve around themselves--but I agree with you, she's not one of that kind. She's totally uninterested in herself. And yet she's got a strong character--there must be something. I thought at first it was her art--but it isn't. I've never met anyone so detached from life. That's dangerous.'
'Dangerous? What do you mean?'
'Well, you see--it must mean an obsession of some kind, and obsessions are always dangerous.