Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

The beaches were overrun with jellyfish these days, the monstrous red stinging kind that that looked like wounds along the shoreline.

She'd been betwitched. She'd pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep.

I'm reaching through time to touch you...you're reaching back to touch me.

I'm a novelist," Ruth said. "I can't help it. My narrative preferences are all I've got.

At one extreme...the hours seemed to aggregate and sell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme when her attention was disengaged and fractured she experienced time at its most granular wherein moments hung around like particles diffused and suspended and standing in water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focussed but vast and time felt like a limpid pool ringed by sunlit ferns.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world, but it felt like we were doing something illegal, lovers or something, because in Japan dads don't generally hug and kiss their kids. Don't ask me why. They just don't. But we kissed and hugged because we were American, at least in our hearts, and then we'd both step away really fast in case anyone was watching.

She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

time isn't something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn't going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you

And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right?

I whispered Now! ... Now! ... Now! ... over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

As I have not much time left in life, I am determined not to be a coward. I will live as earnestly as I can and feel my feelings deeply, I will rigorously reflect upon my thoughts and emotions, and try to improve myself as much as I can. I will continue to write and to study, so that when the time of my death comes, I will die beautifully, as a man in the midst of a supreme and noble effort.

You know how sometimes a thought can feel like it's outside your head, but you know it's really inside? Well, the voices weren't my thoughts. They were outside. They were different.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Pro captu lectoris) habent sua fata libelli. (According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. —Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

The eternal now," he said. "She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point." "Of writing?" "Or suicide.

Stocking up is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. —Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

When everything you think you own—your belongings, your life—can be swept away in an instant, you must ask yourself, What is real?

My anger frightened me more than my fear once had.

Kannon, with her thousand arms and eleven heads, who could hear the voices of things crying out. I said I could totally relate to that, and when she told us that Kannon was the Buddhist saint of compassion

I've always though of writing as the opposite of suicide, she said. That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it. Like Scheherazade? Yes, she said. Spinning tales to forestall her execution...

Waves and starlings, pebbles and crows . . .

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

I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful.