Yōko Ogawa > Quotes

“Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“Still, being alone doesn't mean you have to be miserable. In that sense it's different from losing something. You've still got yourself, even if you lose everything else. You've got to have faith in yourself and not get down just because you're on your own.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“A problem isn't finished just because you've found the right answer.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“The room was filled with a kind of stillness. Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of silence...”
― Yôko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

“Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn't afraid to say 'we don't know.' For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn't have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“If you read a novel to the end, then it’s over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I’d much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a place out there where people whose hearts aren’t empty can go on living.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook.
In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“...he has never read a single page of any of my books.
Once, when I told him I'd love to know what he thinks of them, he demurred.
"I couldn't possibly say," he said. "If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.”
― Yōko Ogawa, Cristallisation secrète

“When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“In general,” he continued, “most things you worry about end up being no more than that—just worries.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“Time is a great healer. It just flows on all of its own accord.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.”
― Yoko Ogawa

“The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words — explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he'll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

“I sometimes wonder what I'd see if I could hold your heart in my hands," I told him. "I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn't quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I'd need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn't slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It's usually hidden deep inside, so it's much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn't that sound marvelous?”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“People—and I’m no exception—seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“They may be nothing more than scraps of paper, but they capture something profound. Light and wind and air, the tenderness or joy of the photographer, the bashfulness or pleasure of the subject. You have to guard these things forever in your heart. That’s why photographs are taken in the first place.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

“For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.”
― Yoko Ogawa, Revenge