Yōko Ogawa · 164 pages
Rating: (3.3K votes)
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“I was always watching you." This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“I'm sure it must have been even more wonderful then, when we were young and knew nothing about the pain of growing up.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“I couldn't reach him from here even if I tried.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“Your body falling through space touches the deepest part of me.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“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.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
Yōko Ogawa
Born place: in Okayama, Japan
Born date March 30, 1962
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“Only you," he said, so softly I could barely hear him. "To worship ye with my body, give ye all the service of my hands. To give ye my name, and all my heart and soul with it. Only you. Because ye will not let me lie--and yet ye love me.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Voyager
“This estrogen force field needs to dissipate... Move along. All of you. Now!”
― Lauren Kate, quote from Torment
“I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
“A person can't help their birth. ”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, quote from Vanity Fair
“Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The God Delusion
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