How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they'd clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this. He felt certain Hatsue felt the same way. (8.41)
Ishmael's love for Hatsue is intense, long-lasting, and ultimately (when she stops returning, or pretending to return, it) debilitating for him. It also appears to involve a certain amount of denial or just self-involvement on his part, since he is consistently out of touch with how Hatsue is feeling.
Quote #2
He and Hatsue spoke of little things at first, then of the San Piedro fields they'd left behind and the smell of ripening strawberries. He had begun to love her, to love more than just her beauty and grace, and when he saw that in their hearts they shared the same dream he felt a great certainty about her. (11.39)
This is a description of how Kabuo's love for Hatsue grew gradually. It's interesting that his love for her grows on the basis of shared dreams and experience, whereas that doesn't really seem to be the case with Ishmael.
Quote #3
He was twenty yards off when she called his name and asked if he would marry her before leaving. "Why do you want to marry me?" he asked, and her answer came back, "To hold a part of you." She dropped the hoe and walked the twenty yards to hold him in her arms. "It's my character, too," she whispered. "It's my destiny now to love you." (11.42)
Whereas Hatsue felt everything was wrong, wrong, wrong with Ishmael, things with Kabuo are so groovy and right that she feels loving him is "destiny." It's pretty much a night and day comparison between her feelings for the two boyfriends, no?
Quote #4
Even when he held her it seemed to him there was a place in her heart he couldn't get to. At times he worked himself up to discussing this, gradually revealing to her how it hurt him to feel there was a part of her love she withheld. Hatsue denied that this was so and explained to him that her emotional reserve was something she couldn't help. She had been carefully trained by her upbringing, she said, to avoid effusive displays of feeling, but this did not mean her heart was shallow. (12.5)
Now we're back to Ishmael's memories of Hatsue and his attempts to figure out her feelings for him (rather than vice versa). Of course, she later comes to the conclusion that she doesn't love him at all, but here it appears she still demonstrates ambivalence.
Quote #5
And she thought she understood what she had long sought to understand, that she concealed her love for Ishmael Chambers not because she was Japanese in her heart but because she could not in truth profess to the world that what she felt for him was love at all. (14.68)
In this moment, Hatsue is starting to admit that perhaps her feelings for her sweetheart are not quite the same thing as love, but it takes her a bit longer to translate that realization into action.
Quote #6
"I'm eighteen," replied Hatsue. "I'm old enough. Stop thinking of me as a little girl. You have to understand—I've grown up." (15.64-65)
When her mother finds out about her relationship with Ishmael, Hatsue finally forces herself to come to terms with her feelings (or lack thereof) for Ishmael. She assures her mother that she can experience and know about love—she's an adult now, after all—but she admits that she doesn't love Ishmael. And that's all Fujiko wants to hear.
Quote #7
"I don't love you, Ishmael. I can think of no more honest way to say it. From the very beginning, when we were little children, it seemed to me something was wrong. Whenever we were together I knew it. I felt it inside of me. I loved you and I didn't love you at the very same moment, and I felt troubled and confused." (24.70)
In her letter to Ishmael from Manzanar, Hatsue breaks the bad news that she not only doesn't love him now, but also that she may never have loved him (yikes). Naturally, Ishmael is devastated by the revelation.
Quote #8
What was it Nels Gudmundsson had said in closing? "The counsel for the state has proceeded on the assumption that you will be open, ladies and gentlemen, to an argument based on prejudice [...] He is counting on you to act on passions best left to a war ten years ago." But ten years was not really such a long time at all, and how was he to leave his passion behind when it went on living its own independent life, as tangible as the phantom limb he'd refused for so long to have denervated? (30.6)
In an interesting mirror of his fellow islanders' inability to let the past go, Ishmael claims he hasn't had enough time to "leave his passion" for Hatsue behind. For both Ishmael and the islanders, the inability to move on is harmful and even dangerous. Because of their prejudices, Kabuo's jury is unable to view evidence in the trial fairly (which means Kabuo could easily get executed for a crime he didn't commit). Meanwhile, Ishmael is totally stunted and paralyzed by his inability to let go of his love for Hatsue. The fact that Ishmael turns Gudmundsson's closing statements—with their desperate plea for Kabuo's life—into yet another opportunity to mope about his love life is strikingly sad (and, to less sympathetic eyes, pretty pathetic and self-involved).
Quote #9
He read her letter another time and understood that she had once admired him, there was something in him she was grateful for even if she could not love him. That was a part of himself he'd lost over the years, that was the part that was gone. (31.20)
This is the moment in which Ishmael finally comes to terms with the fact that Hatsue is gone from his life (in a romantic sense) forever. Since he follows up these reflections by bringing the evidence exonerating Kabuo to Hatsue, perhaps Ishmael is going to stop living in the past and start working on getting that missing part of himself back.
Quote #10
Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so, he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart. (32.82)
In Ishmael's view, everything is pretty much chance or accident except love, which exerts its own will (as Ishmael knows only too well).