Quotes from Y?ko Ogawa

I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes.

After sitting for so long in the ruined cabin, the objects we had taken must have been shocked when we pulled them out into the world. I could almost sense their fear, coming through the bags.

It seemed as though the secret of the universe had miraculously appeared right here at our feet, as though God's notebook had opened under our bench.

I had no intention of running after him. It was as though he had already gone somewhere far away, and I could run and run but I would never catch him.

You have to stop worrying about things like that. The disappearances are beyond our control. They have nothing to do with us. We're all going to die anyway, someday, so what's the difference? We simply have to leave things to fate.

The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers.

It was as if a tiny crack had opened somewhere in him and was growing, tearing him to pieces. If he had simply been angry, I might have found a way to calm him, but I had no idea how to put him back together once he came apart.

No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives.

In these pages, the Professor had walked beyond beaten paths, looking for truth in a place no one knows.

I was afraid that if she went on much longer, her fingers would scrape away my skin, rip my flesh, crush my bones. The pillow was damp with saliva, and I wanted to scream.

Any kind of uncertainty caused him pain, so we were determined to hide the time that had passed and the memories he'd lost.

The reason she was crying didn't matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity.

I knew immediately that it was different from other photographs. The night sky in the background was pure and black, so dark it made you dizzy if you stared at it too long. The rain drifted through the frame like a gentle mist, but right in the middle was a hollow area in the shape of a lima been.

Perhaps this was just evidence that his body was adapting to the secret room. Perhaps it was necessary to rid oneself of everything that was superfluous in order to immerse completely in this airless, soundproof, narrow space shrouded in the fear of discovery and arrest. In recompense for a mind that was able to retain everything, every memory, perhaps it was necessary that the body gradually fade away.

I watched him walking away, sweater over his shoulders, bag in hand, until he was no more than a tiny point in the distance. I watched, without so much as blinking, and I realized how utterly lonely I was. But all my staring couldn't prevent that distant point from vanishing like a snowflake dissolving in the sunlight.

His joy had little to do with the difficulty of the problem. Simple or hard, the pleasure was in sharing it with us.

It was hard to know what was coming, where our lives would lead, and it made me sad to think about the future.

The waves of regret were gentle, but I know they would ripple on forever

When you lost your voice, you lost the ability to make sense of yourself. But don't worry. You'll be staying right here. You'll live among the fading voices trapped in these typewriters, and I'll be here with you, giving you instructions. Nothing too difficult.

You may be thinking that a bag is just a thing in which to put other things. And you're right, of course. But that's what makes them so extraordinary. A bag has no intentions or desires of its own, it embraces every object that we ask it to hold. You trust the bag, and it, in return, trusts you. To me, a bag is patience; a bag is profound discretion.

It wasn't pride that prevented him from asking for help but a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for those of us who lived in the normal world.

Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp. The words that came from my mother's mouth thrilled me, like the names of little girls from distant countries or new species of plants. As I listened to her talk, it made me happy to imagine a time when all these things had a place here on the island.

When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing." - Yoko Ogawa

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.