Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

it's okay to have impossible goals, because if you follow your unreachable star no matter how hopeless or far, your heart will be peaceful when you're dead, even though you might be scorned and covered with scars like I am while you're still alive.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives

I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense.

As he ran through the dense understory, he could read the signs of arboreal intrigue, the drama and power struggles as species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or giant firs and fungal spores opted to work together for their mutual benefit. He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature, and he would come home, sweating and breathless, and tell her what he'd seen.

The moment I saw the gate I had a strong thought to turn around and throw myself headfirst down the steep stone steps or just let myself free-fall backward into the pillowy softness of eternity, and it wouldn't matter if I bumped and bounced like a cabbage all the way down until I hit the bottom and then rolled out to sea, because at least I'd be safe and dead.

I don't hate anybody.

I don't give a shit about pretty, I informed her. I'm a superhero. Superheroes don't need pretty.

As I sat by my mother's side and held her hand and watched her, I remember thinking, I'm going to do this too, some day. This is what dying looks like. This is what Dad looked like when he died, and what I'm going to look like, too. Like Mom and Dad. It was comforting to know what I would look like. It made death a little less frightening, a little more intimate, a little more dear.

Although he claimed not to understand matters of human conscience, it was precisely his own conscience that led him to question the status quo, and which would cost

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.

When I stand on the edge of a tall place I feel like I'm on the edge of time, peering into forever. The question 'What if...?' rises up in my mind, and it's exciting because I know that in the next instant, in less time than it takes to snap my fingers, I could fly into eternity.

Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.

You can't hold on to water or keep it from leaking away.

When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.

On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.

Everything seemed to grow blacker as I sat there, except for the fireflies whose tiny pulsing lights drew arcs through the dark summer air. On off . . . on off . . . on off . . . on off. The longer I stared, the dizzier I got, until I felt as if the world was tipping and pitching me forward down the mountainside into the long throat of the night.

Where do you think poems come from? Everything speaks, young schoolboy! But it is only poets and prophets, saints and philosophers who hef ze ears to hear." "They hear voices?" "Of course! Socrates! And Joan of Arc! Rilke, Milton, Blake . . . !

The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it's true, even though I don't really like uncertainty. I'd much rather 'know', but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.