Ruth Ozeki Quotes

If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated.

Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes."
"Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.

Are you a male or a female or somewhere in between?

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle.

Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces, again and again.

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.

And my coffee is Blue Mountain and I drink it black, which is unusual for a teenage girl, but it's definitely the way good coffee should be drunk if you have any respect for the bitter beans.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

You can feel life completely by taking it away

My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.

There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.

I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too,

Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.

You can't hold on to water or keep it from leaking away.

At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.

He's stopped reading The Great Minds of Western Philosophy completely, and spend all his time programming, which really is his superpower. I mean, there are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like superstrength, and superspeed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves just by being there.

Stocking up" is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.

Don't waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! 6.

I've always though of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it."
"Like Scheherazade?"
"Yes," she said. "Spinning tales to forestall her execution ...

There's so much to write. Where should I start?
I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:
'You should start where you are

As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener.

She told me it's called the Maka Hanya Haramita Shingyo,69 which means something like the Great Most Excellent Wisdom Heart Sutra. The only part I remember goes like this: Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70 It's pretty abstract. Old Jiko tried to explain it to me, and I don't know if I understood it correctly or not, but I think it means that nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things - including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and even me and you - are just kind of flowing through for the time being.

At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's okay to do if you're in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you'd better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they'll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn't such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don't say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

When I stand on the edge of a tall place I feel like I'm on the edge of time, peering into forever. The question 'What if ... ?' rises up in my mind, and it's exciting because I know that in the next instant, in less time than it takes to snap my fingers, I could fly into eternity.

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.

I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature - the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds - which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.

I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.

When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.

Every seed has a story.

I believe that in the deepest places in their hearts, people are violent and take pleasure in hurting each other.

She smiled. Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding hands again. I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can't hold on to water , still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.

There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.

She'd been betwitched. She'd pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

Together we'll make magic ...
Who had conjured whom?
She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't 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 wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd 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 wasn't so sure.

There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there.

Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I'm just wasting my time, and I'm not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.
And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you're probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in,113 and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg.

When I wash my feet May all sentient beings Attain the power of supernatural feet With no hindrance to their practice. Of

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.

But by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island..

Everything seemed to grow blacker as I sat there, except for the fireflies whose tiny pulsing lights drew arcs through the dark summer air. On off . . . on off . . . on off . . . on off. The longer I stared, the dizzier I got, until I felt as if the world was tipping and pitching me forward down the mountainside into the long throat of the night.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

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

When I run out of the things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.

The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's 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.

Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.

Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand "flying" as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.

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.

Le mal de vivre, 'the pain of life.' Qu'll faut bien vivre ... 'that we must live with, or endure.' Vaille que vivre, this is difficult but it is something like 'we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.

Hi!
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad Chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you're reading this, then maybe by now you're wondering about me, too.
You wonder about me.
I Wonder about you.
Who are you and what are you doing?

Soaking them in buckets of seawater, to which she'd add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She'd agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours.

Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.

What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?

If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now; which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.

There's something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer - the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You're not praying to a god, but you're almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That's what books do: they're an invitation to readers.

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.

time isn't something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn't going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.

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 ?

True freedom comes from being unknown.

I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance.

Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.

She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.

The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.

It's okay to have impossible goals, because if you follow your unreachable star no matter how hopeless or far, your heart will be peaceful when you're dead, even though you might be scorned and covered with scars like I am while you're still alive.

I don't mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting

Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay?

The eternal now," he said. "She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point." "Of writing?" "Or suicide.

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

Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing."
"That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's 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.

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The past (...) It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn't now, then where did it go?

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.
That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.
And just like that, you die.

No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived.

For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?

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

On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that?
Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it's true, even though I don't really like uncertainty. I'd much rather 'know', but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.

Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing.
"Not same," old Jiko would have said. "Not different, either.

Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "Ignorance." In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence... If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance... Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement.

What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.

Ignorance. In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.

Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.

Language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.

Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don't know how to translate it, but basically it means that we're spaced out and careless because we don't understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd 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 people's 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.

In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.

One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first.