“Yes...well, the driver would have veered to the left. In other words, your death was a complete and utter waste!”
Botan Quotes
2 quotes from YuYu Hakusho, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The ferrywoman of the dead, cheerful about it, who informs Yusuke in the first ten minutes that his sacrifice was a waste. Her job for the rest of the series is explaining the rules of the afterlife to people who ignore them.
“They can't hear words unless they're asleep, but you can communicate feelings to living people when they're on the same emotional wavelength. See? You reached Kuwabara with your feelings.”
The ghost-story rules Botan lays out here are the same rules the show will later call spirit awareness and hand to Kuwabara as a power, which is a neat bit of long-range plotting for a series that is mostly improvising. What she is really telling Yusuke is that the boy he has spent two episodes mocking is the one person in the living world tuned to him. Yusuke's reply is to tell her to stop getting mushy. The episode built to this with a test score: Kuwabara, who cannot pass an exam, passes one because a dead rival showed up in his dream to make him study, and then does not punch the teacher who cheated him because that same rival shouted at him not to. The feelings that got through were not affection. They were a fight postponed.
Read Botan's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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This is the series' opening bet, made in its first ten minutes: the heroic sacrifice did not matter. The child Yusuke shoved out of the road would have survived anyway, and the ferrywoman explaining this to the newly dead teenager is cheerful about it. Most stories of this kind spend their first episode establishing that the hero's death was meaningful; this one establishes that it was pointless and then asks whether he wants to come back anyway. Everything about Yusuke's return follows from that. He is not being rewarded. He is being given a second try because the first one was an accident nobody in Spirit World had scheduled, and Botan's tone tells him so.