Quotes from Y?ko Ogawa

Root always showed amazing insight when it came to the Professor.

I was impressed by the delicate weaving of the numbers. No matter how carefully you unraveled a thread, a single moment of inattention could leave you stranded, with no clue what to do next. In all his years of study, the Professor had managed to glimpse several pieces of the lace. I could only hope that some part of him remembered the exquisite pattern.

Your body falling through space touches the deepest part of me.

The blades touched my abdomen. A cold shock ran through me, and my head began to spin. If he had pressed just a bit harder, the scissors might have pierced my soft belly. The skin would have peeled back, the fat beneath laid bare. Blood would have dripped on the bedspread.

The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation. One day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had.

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.

Few people here have any need of novels

I suspect the only reason I've been able to go on writing is that I've had your heart by my side all along. — Y?ko Ogawa, The Memory Police , transl. Stephen Snyder (Pantheon, 2019)

We made the zero, through great pain and struggle.

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

Allí donde se queman los libros, se acaba quemando también persona

It's the most beautiful disappearance ever.

No matter how hard I listened, there was never any sign of someone living under the floor, and yet this silence made me all the more conscious of his existence.

But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner, too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn't worry.

The traces of my father's presence, which I had done my best to preserve, had vanished, replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled. I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth.

But what if human beings themselves disappear?" I asked.

It's like copying truths from God's notebook, though we aren't always sure where to find this notebook or when it will be open.

Since that time, I've had many similar moments, and I can never hear the words "family" and "home" without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them and let them go. When I stop to examine them, though, the words seem hollow, seem to rattle at my feet like empty cans.

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.

I thought I could hear the sound of my memory burning that night.

Disappeared' is the only way to describe it-it was as if he dissolved into thin air without so much as a whimper. I wouldn't have believed that a human being with a brain, a heart, with arms and legs and the power of speech could have simple vanished like that. There was nothing about him that suggested he would disappear.

Are you eating?" I asked. "You have to keep up your strength." "All of a sudden you're grown and worrying about me, instead of the other way around. Seems like yesterday you were just a little boy.

She had changed the subject so quickly that I completely forgot to congratulate her. But, then again, I wasn't quite sure congratulations were appropriate for a baby who would be born to my sister and her husband. I looked up "congratulate" in the dictionary: it said, "to wish someone joy." "That doesn't mean much," I muttered, tracing my finger over a line of characters that held no promise of joy themselves.

If Mother is so intent on paying me compliments, it might be because she doesn't really love me very much. In fact, the more she tells me how pretty I am, the uglier I feel. To be honest, I have never once thought of myself as pretty