Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?

You can feel life completely by taking it away

Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.

Le mal de vivre, 'the pain of life.' Qu'll faut bien vivre... 'that we must live with, or endure.' Vaille que vivre, this is difficult but it is something like 'we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.

she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people's business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.

She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.

At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave.

No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived.

nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things---including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and me and you---are just flowing through for the time being.

Because in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born.

Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.

A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.

Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem." He sighed. "In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.

The Buddha said that responding to email and Twitter is like sweeping the sands from the banks of the Ganges River." "The Buddha said that?" "Well, maybe not. But the point remains the same. Some tasks are impossible, even if you are a Buddha. Even if you have eleven heads and a thousand arms.

Maybe this is what it's like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody's answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you're dead.

The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. 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.

The past (...) It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn't now, then where did it go?

You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I'd ever seen or felt before.

Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don't know how to translate it, but basically it means that we're spaced out and careless because we don't understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.

Dreams are like doors. They're like portals to another reality, and once they're open, you better watch out.

In Zen we have a story. If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, "Oh, that's too bad, but it's not my problem"? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.

Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better?