“If I were the rain, that binds together the heavens and the earth, whom in all eternity will never mingle, would I be able to bind two hearts together?”
Orihime Inoue Quotes
2 quotes from Bleach, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Kurosaki-kun... I'm weak, so it's always like I turn back to look to you for help. But now I won't turn back and I'll go forward. The next time we meet I won't look to you for help, Kurosaki-kun, I'll be able to fight on my own.”
She is saying goodbye to a sleeping boy, having agreed to walk into Hueco Mundo alone so that Ulquiorra will spare her friends, and the speech is a vow about the next time. What the next time actually costs is the arc's cruelest joke: she keeps the vow, does not call for help, and spends the entire Hueco Mundo story in a white room while the people she left come to get her anyway. The independence she promised was granted only as captivity. Then the ending turns it once more. The one moment she does what she promised, standing between Ichigo and Ulquiorra and refusing to look away, she gets a corpse to talk to and a monster in his place. The line is sincere and the story honours it at a price she did not sign for.
Read Orihime Inoue'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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For the metaphor to mean anything the series first had to make rain a wound. It did: Ichigo's mother died on a riverbank in the rain, and his inner world storms when he despairs, and the sword itself tells him it hates the rain. Orihime does not know any of that. She is talking about the weather and about two people who cannot reach each other, and the reader hears her describe the one thing Ichigo cannot bear as the thing she would like to become. That gap is the whole device. She is offering to be the connective tissue in a story where connective tissue is what falls on a boy holding his mother's body. The line is gentle and the structure it sits in is not, which is a fair description of her role in the series generally.