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
“It can be hard to say important things to the person in our life who matters the most.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, quote from A Lancaster County Christmas
“Leaders who doubt that success is possible and who fear the worst should immediately change their attitude or resign so a true leader can take their place.”
― Henry T. Blackaby, quote from Spiritual Leadership: Moving People on to God's Agenda
“But who are they that for no other reason but that they were weary of life have hastened their own fate? Were they not the next neighbors to wisdom? among whom, to say nothing of Diogenes, Xenocrates, Cato, Cassius, Brutus, that wise man Chiron, being offered immortality, chose rather to die than be troubled with the same thing always.”
― Erasmus, quote from Praise of Folly
“Family isn’t blood—it’s who has your back.”
― Dannika Dark, quote from Seven Years
“I fart, you fart, he farts, she farts.
Let’s not deny it, people. Farting is a regular, healthy, and hilarious part of life. Squeezing out big plumes of noxious gas doesn’t always smell good, but it generally feels might fine.”
― Neil Pasricha, quote from The Book of (Even More) Awesome
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