Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . . These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this: gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . . I

Start again. Tell the readers how they met. Start at the beginning.

In this Unbound state that night you encountered all that was and ever could be: form and emptiness, and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in.

God is a story," he said. "I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.

Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.' A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.

What do scissors sound like? What did they say? Sly and steely, they started softly, a small susurration that quickly grew, whispering and slicing, hissing and metallic, forming what sounded more like human words, in a language Benny took to be Chinese, although he couldn't be sure. He didn't speak Chinese, so how could he know? But he seemed to understand all the snide, snippy things they insinuated into his ear about his teacher, Ms. Pauley.

I knew I was dead, even if my parents didn't notice.

Music or madness. It's totally up to you.

Unbelievable! It was a total setup. They were all watching me carefully now, my mom, Muji, Jiko, who I sensed could see me through her closed eyelids, and my dad, who was still on the balcony, pretending to be all nonchalant and casual. I hate it when grown-ups watch you like that. Makes you feel like a malfunctioning cyborg. Not quite human.

You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people's tolerances, and it won't be long before the stuff just doesn't work anymore. There's all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It's like back to the future—we're headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.

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.

My throat clogged up like an old drain with these happy memories.

The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.

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.

Waited for the Library to settle into the deep, dark silence of slumbering books, and words tucked in between their covers for the night.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.30 And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

I've always thought time was a little iffy, myself.

The abbot thought jazz-playing monks might garner media attention and attract more young people to the temple. They called the band Thelonious.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like we were lovers or something, because in Japan dads don't generally hug and kiss their kids. Don't ask me why. They just don't. But we kissed and hugged because we were American, at least in our hearts, and then we'd both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.

It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.

And yet, at night I lie on my bed, counting my beads, one for every thing on earth I love, on and on, in a circle without end.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health?

literary acts are inherently disembodied, more notional and distributed. We rely on you to embody us, and we exist because you can.