Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

The only time they ever throw anything away is when its really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?

Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying you. た means house, and with the honorific お, it literally means your honorable house, implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.

A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.

Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.

(...) 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything Id ever seen or felt before.

You got a choice, dude. Weve all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day were making choices. Youve just been making bad ones, is all.

Together well make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadnt really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasnt. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. Shed never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasnt so sure.

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your babys body. Only he wasnt a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

Live. For Now. For the time being.

Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesnt cheat or abuse you, then its in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things shed never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some peoples faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that.

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like youre breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.

You never know who its going to be, or what theyll bring, but whatever it is, its always exactly what is needed.

Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.

Jiko: Surfer, wave, same thing.Thats just stupid, I said. A surfers a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.