The Housekeeper and the Professor
Yōko Ogawa
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it”
“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.”
“So you think that zero was there waiting for us when humans came into being,like the flowers and the stars? You should have more respect for human progress. We made the zero, through great pain and struggle.”
“Are all things quantifiable, and all numbers fraught with poetic possibility?”
“In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth.”
“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 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.”
“he seemed convinced that children’s questions were much more important than those of an adult. He preferred smart questions to smart answers.”
“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomenon, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give the expression – in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.”
“They say it'll be even hotter tomorrow. that's how we spend the summer. complaining about the heat.”
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Book Keywords:
mathematics, math, proof-of-god, summer, pg-116, relationships
