Quotes from Y?ko Ogawa

The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing. And since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible to express it as a figure. So someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number. This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist.

No matter how careful we are, we all leave behind little bits of ourselves as we go about our lives. Hair, sweat, fingernails, tears…any of which can be tested. No one can escape.

Are all things quantifiable, and all numbers fraught with poetic possibility?

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.

Maybe there's a place out there where people whose hearts aren't empty can go on living.

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, "Find your left eye," I suppose it would be difficult to do so.

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. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules.

I needed this eternal truth [...] I needed the sense that this invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one, that this one, true line extended infinitely, without width or area, confidently piercing through the shadows. Somehow, this line would help me find peace.

he seemed convinced that children's questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers.

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

A real line has only one dimension, and that means it is impossible to draw it on a piece of real paper.

They say it'll be even hotter tomorrow. that's how we spend the summer. complaining about the heat.

When I'm curled up in his arms like this, I can never tell how my body looks to him. I worry that I seem completely ridiculous, but I have the ability to squeeze into any little space he leaves for me. I fold my legs until they take up almost no room at all, and curl in my shoulders until they're practically dislocated. Like a mummy in a tomb. And when I get like this, I don't care if I never get out; or maybe that's exactly what I hope will happen.

A problem has a rhythm of its own, just like a piece of music," the Professor said. "Once you get the rhythm, you get the sense of the problem as a whole, and you can see where the traps might be waiting.

Your heart and mine are being pulled apart to such different, distant places. Yours is overflowing with warmth and life and sounds and smells, but mine is growing cold and hard at a terrifying pace. At some point it will break into a thousand pieces, shards of ice that will dissolve.

The mathematics stacks were as silent and empty as ever—apparently no one suspected the riches hidden there.

If spring never comes, does that mean summer won't either? How will the crops grow when the fields are covered with snow?

Far from being amicable, the numbers seem to turn their backs on each other, and I couldn't find a pair with even the most tenuous connection, let alone this wonderfully intimate one. The Professor was right. My birthday and his watch had overcome great trials and tribulations to meet each other in the vast sea of numbers.

The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world. Life isn't going to be easier, not is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers.

Maybe there's a place out there where people whose hearts aren't empty can go on living.

I'm sure it must have been even more wonderful then, when we were young and knew nothing about the pain of growing up.

They seemed so stubborn, resisting division by any number but one and themselves.

I was glad that I was able to erase your voice. Did you know that an insect will fall silent if you cut off its antennae? It will just sit there, as if frozen, and even refuse to eat. The same as you, really.