Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”She smiled. “Was it a good feeling?”“Mm,” I said.“That’s good,” she said. “Have another rice ball?

Information is a lot like water; its hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes theyre called shamans, sometimes theyre called mad, and sometimes theyre called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

“Live. For Now. For the time being.”

“If youve ever tried to keep a diary, then youll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, youre always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to whats happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.”

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesnt know, then where did it go?”

“I whispered Now! ... Now! ... Now! ... over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. Its already then.”

“A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.”

“At one extreme...the hours seemed to aggregate and sell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme when her attention was disengaged and fractured she experienced time at its most granular wherein moments hung around like particles diffused and suspended and standing in water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focussed but vast and time felt like a limpid pool ringed by sunlit ferns.”