“No matter how cold and distant people may become, on the inside something warm and precious always remains, something that never changes. To me, that's what family is like.”
Tomoyo Sakagami Quotes
2 quotes from Clannad, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
A student-council candidate, given a compressed route in the anime and one speech about family that the whole series stands behind.
“Time and titles don't determine the strength of someone's friendship.”
The argument at Tomoya's house is about who counts as involved in his suspension, and Tomoyo has just told Kyou, Ryou and Kotomi that as far as this incident goes they are outsiders. This is her answer to Kyou's point that they have known Okazaki since his junior year, and it is a graceful one, but the scene is a quarrel over a boy and the line is a debating point in it. What gives it some weight is the fact behind the suspension: Tomoya took the blame for a fight so that Tomoyo, running for student council, would not be disqualified, and she knows it. A person who has been given that kind of gift has standing to say that duration is not what a bond is made of.
Tomoyo is the student-council candidate with a family that nearly fell apart, and the line belongs to the episode in which she tells Tomoya how her brother risked his life to keep their parents from divorcing, not to the lunch-box quarrel at Tomoya's house earlier in it, where her answer to Kyou's claim of seniority is the line about time and titles. The anime compresses her route into a few episodes, and this speech is where the compression shows. Here it is a good line asked to carry more than the show has built. It is also, in a series whose hero has no working family at all, a character defining the word for him, which is why it is on this page in spite of that.