Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader's eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.

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

She smiled. "Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

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

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.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it's the other way around.

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. 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, it kind of broke my heart.

What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn't now, then where did it go ?

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, 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.

For the time being Words scatter Are they fallen leaves?

I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.

And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic!

For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.

But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there.

Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay?

Live. For Now. For the time being.

The way you write ronin is ?? with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was 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.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.

The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.