Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Day before yesterday I saw a rabbit, and yesterday a deer, and today, you.”
Kotomi Ichinose Quotes
2 quotes from Clannad, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The school's top student, who introduces herself the same way to everyone and stopped growing up on the afternoon her parents did not come home. Her strangest lines are her saddest.
“Hello. How do you do? I'm Kotomi Ichinose of 3-A. I love to read; books I mean.”
This is Kotomi's rehearsed introduction, delivered word for word every time she meets someone, and the writers have her produce it inside Tomoya's dream sequence, which is where the anime dumps the comedy it could not fit into her arc. The odd clarification at the end, that by reading she means books, is the character in one sentence. She is the top student in the school and has no idea how to talk to anyone, so she memorized a greeting. Kotomi is the Key heroine the anime treats least well; her route is squeezed into four episodes and the adaptation leans on the dream episode to make her likeable in a hurry. The line survives because it is genuinely funny and because it is true, and because a girl who introduces herself the same way to everyone is a girl who has never had the chance to introduce herself twice to the same person.
Kotomi says this to Tomoya as a greeting, and the anime does not explain it, which is correct, because the explanation is the whole arc. It is a line from a book her parents, both physicists, gave her before they died in a plane crash when she was small, and the day they died she was a child Tomoya used to play with and has since forgotten. The sentence is how the two of them once said hello. Kotomi's arc is the one where Clannad's habit of hiding grief inside whimsy is most exposed: the violin gag, the reading in the library, the strange greeting, all of it is a girl who stopped growing up on the afternoon her parents did not come home. When Tomoya finally remembers, the greeting is the thing that returns. The most charming line in her episodes is also the saddest one, and the show trusts the viewer to arrive at that unassisted.