Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

There's so much to write. Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this: 'You should start where you are

It is not true, what I said before, because I hated him. He was the war criminal, and after the war they hanged him. I was so happy I wept for joy when I heard he was dead. Then I shave my head and took the vow to stop hating.

This is trouble with you. You think you want, you don't think you want–always back and forth. Me, when I want, it is with whole heart. I look at wanted thing with eyes straight on. But you! Neither here nor there. Your looking always crooked, from side of eye. It has no power to hold. So wanted thing, it slip away from you.

Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind.

I'm sorry. I was just talking to the moon.

and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree ...

There's nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I've already said this.

If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now ; which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.

There's nothing like realizing that you don't have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life.

Everything in the universe is 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.

Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience

In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence.

You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion.

I thought progress was a good thing." "Well, maybe not if it just keeps piling up more junk and keeps you from fixing stuff from the past.

when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, Thanks, toilet, and it felt pretty natural.

Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.

Great is the Matter of Birth and Death. Life is transient. Time will not wait. Wake up! Wake up! Do not waste a moment!

Space and time were hopelessly entangled, and the present moment was growing increasingly remote.

Music is like outer space, Benny. No need for flying to some other place. Everything is so beautiful right here.

but by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island..

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

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.