Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

noise-canceling headphones

Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever. But of course this is all just delusion, too! Suicide is just part of life, so it is part of the delusion.

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

Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate. Ruth

Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I'm reeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad's ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom's on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.

if the washroom was unreal, then none of what he remembered from that afternoon in the washroom could be real, either.

email on his iPhone.

His story was moving and tragic, too. Although he claimed not to understand matters of human conscience, it was precisely his own conscience that led him to question the status quo, and which would cost him his job later on.

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.

A harder case is when we study about a terrible Japanese atrocity like Manchu. In this case, we Japanese people committed genocide and torture of the Chinese people, and so we learn we must feel great shame to the world.

Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up?

Shame comes from outside, but conscience must be a natural feeling that comes from a deep place inside an individual person.

Later that evening, they reconstructed Kenji's poem, but Benny never touched the magnets again or made another poem with them, and for a while, the raggedy constellation of words remained frozen. My abundant woman mother goddess love r we are symphony together I am mad for you

He sat perfectly still, studying his hands in his lap. "I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill," he said. "But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun.

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.

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

According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their own destinies.

Everything in the universe is 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.

Cory made it so I didn't get arrested or banned from the Library. I just had to promise to check in with a librarian whenever I visited, so they would know I was there.

Jinsei no Itami

Plastic is like that," Oliver was saying. "It never biodegrades. It gets churned around in the gyre and ground down into particles. Oceanographers call it confetti. In a granular state, it hangs around forever.

We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.

Montaigne wrote that death itself is nothing. It is only the fear of death that makes death seem important.