Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history.

Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes.

Her failure didn't matter, because at least she'd been true to her impossible dream until the very end.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

I don't believe I exist, and soon I won't. I am a time being about to expire.

At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.

He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.

If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.

So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, "Hmm, I don't really remember being born

One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first.

Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.

story is more than just a discarded by-product if your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen.

Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.

We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.

Now that I think of it, maybe she loves him because all his problems give her so much to pray about, and when you're as old as she is , and your body is like enough already, you need some pretty powerful reasons to stay alive.

By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.

A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean...A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

I was thinking about what she aid about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can't hold on to water, I still gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away