Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what's left of local color. We are a grisly nation.

I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide,' she said. 'That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.

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.

For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop, For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor, For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms, For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha, For the time being, a monk's staff or a master's fly- swatter, For the time being, a pillar or a lantern, For the time being, any Dick or Jane, For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.

As slaves to your obsessions, we know what it feels like to be impressed and bound. But at the same time we understand that thoughts like these are just idle tropes, fantasies we spin to while away the hours. Fantasies, being something that we books excel at. The real stories—the ones that happen—belong to you.

borrow them with no intention of returning them. But, Benjamin says, "Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even.

Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses -- so blunt and yet so beautiful -- it's impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too. Books are in an odd position, caught halfway in between. We are sensible, if not sentient. We are semi-living.

Maybe it's time for artists to get out of the studio and move into the streets? I want to focus more on unmaking.

So thank you for noticing, and thank you, too, for what you said just now: I knew you were mine. These are words every book wants to hear, and they sent a tremor of delight down our spine.

But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation?

I felt it wouldn't kill me to learn something before I died

A paradox for sure, but such a relief.

As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener.

She might be a hundred and four and say some pretty wack things, but my old Jiko is totally dependable.

She knew so much about what was happening in the world, even as she grew more isolated from it.

I thought I understood everything about cruelty, but it turns out, I didn't understand anything at all.

He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing, 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.

No era un poema. Era un único carácter. Cinco trazos. Sei. Ikiru. Vivir. Sujetando aún el pincel, nos miró a mi padre y a mí: —Por el momento —nos dijo a los dos—. Por ahora.

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. It's already then.

Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.

At every juncture—in every Zen moment when possibilities arise—a schism occurs, worlds branch, and multiplicity ensues. Every instance of either/or is replaced by an and. And an and, and an and, and an and, and another and . . . adding up to an infinitely all-inclusive, and yet mutually unknowable, web of many worlds.

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