Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

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.

The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.

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.

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.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

Maybe all teenagers feel like they don't fit in. I never felt like a cool kid. I remember being bullied for being Asian.

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

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

True freedom comes from being unknown.

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.

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.

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.

No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.

He's got this thing about Canada. He says it's like America only with health care and no guns, and you can live up to your potential there and not have to worry about what society thinks or about getting sick or getting shot.

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

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.

Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote back this: ?????????. You should start where you are.

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

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.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

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