The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #1)

by Keigo Higashino

Without people to question the status quo, how can we ever hope to arrive at truly rational decisions?’

‘That’s what happens when you free people from the restraints of time. They make their own rigid schedule.’

‘Which is harder: devising an unsolvable problem, or solving that problem?

Your assumptions are your worst enemies. Trust them too much, and you’ll fail to see what’s right under your nose.’

When an amateur attempts to conceal something, the more complex he makes his camouflage, the deeper the grave he digs for himself. But not so a genius. The genius does something far simpler, yet something no normal person would even dream of, the last thing a normal person would think of doing. And from this simplicity, immense complexity is created.’

‘The last time I met Ishigami, he presented me with a mathematical conundrum,’ he said. ‘It’s a famous one, the P = NP problem. Basically, it asks whether it’s more difficult to think of the solution to a problem yourself or to ascertain if someone else’s answer to the same problem is correct.’

‘There are some things in life that we have to accept as truth, even though we don’t want to believe them.

Still, it was so hard to hide the truth. Would she ever really be able to be happy, with something so dark hidden inside? She would have to live the rest of her life with this guilt, never knowing true peace. But maybe, Yasuko thought, enduring that guilt is a way of doing penance.

How short is a lifetime, he thought, compared to the time it will take humankind to find all the rich veins of mathematical ore where they lie sleeping and tease them forth into the world.

It was like his relationship with mathematics: it was enough merely to be associated with something so sublime. To seek any kind of acknowledgment would sully its dignity.

Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone’s saviour.