Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

I don't know any prayers, so I just make them go round and round and say blessings in my head for all the things and people I love, and when I run out of 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.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then. Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates it's meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.

The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it's like locking eyes or touching someone's hand for the first time, and we feel it, too.

Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too. Stuff like this can drive you crazy.

At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand what was happening.

part yamamba,105 all at once. All the ages and stages, combined into a single female time being.

Congratulations, the new slip said. You made it.

Pencils have stories inside them, and they're safe as long as you don't stick the point in your ear.

She had read somewhere that watching kurage was beneficial to your health because it reduces stress levels, only the problem was that a lot of other housewives had read the same article, so it was always crowded in front of the tank, and the aquarium had to set out folding chairs, and you had to get there really early in order to get a good spot, all of which was very stressful.

Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency.

Time slowed down, and each moment unfolded into a future filled with infinite possibilities.

My fist, gripping the knife, looked like it meant business, and my arm felt strong and powerful, too. I liked that. Standing there, we were frozen in time, me and Daisuke-kun, and the future was mine. No matter what I chose to do, for this one moment I owned Daisuke and I owned his future. It was a strange feeling, creepy and a little too intimate, because if I killed him now we would be joined for life, forever, and so I released him. He crumpled at my feet.

the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

All the books warned that behavioral changes in early teens could be sudden and extreme, but the intensity of Benny's distress scared her. He acted spooked, haunted.

the newly empowered advertising industry used its forked tongue to convert citizens into consumers. But

And so, yes. The Tidy Magic that Cory read was different from the Tidy Magic that Annabelle read, and different, too, from the book that Aikon thought she wrote and her critics on Twitter condemned—and yet all these books were accurate, complete and perfect, just as they are.

In this way, fluid and shape-shifting, we divide and multiply and move through time and space.

For most humans throughout history, "more" wasn't even an option. "Enough" was the goal and was, by definition, enough.

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.

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 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.

Shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki.70

Oh, but wait. It just occurred to me, maybe you don't actually know their secrets? I kind of assumed that books know everything, but maybe you're a stupid book, or a lazy book, the kind that starts in the middle because you don't know how a story begins and can't be bothered to figure it out.

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?