“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.
A student-council candidate with a delinquent past, 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 in Tomoya's flat 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 retreat from that position, 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. The anime's Tomoyo has less screen time than the visual novel's, so viewers who like the line usually like it for the season-two spin-off she was never given here.
Tomoyo is the student-council candidate with a delinquent past and a family that nearly fell apart, and the line comes in the middle of the lunch-box competition at Tomoya's flat, where five girls are fighting over who gets to feed him during his suspension. Kyou has just argued that she and Ryou have known him longer, and Tomoyo's reply about family is her answer to a squabble about seniority. The anime compresses her route into a few episodes, and this speech is where the compression shows; in the visual novel the sentence has a whole storyline behind it, about her parents' separation and the accident that brought them back. 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, the one time a character defines the word for him, which is why it is on this page in spite of that.