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Quotes About Time

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.
~ Ruth Ozeki
books are patient. We know how urgent and compelling your lives are, and so we bide our time.
~ Ruth Ozeki
I hate email. It's so slow. On email it's never now. It's always then, which is why it's so easy to get lazy and let your inbox fill up.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell 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 in standing water.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever. But of course this is all just delusion, too! Suicide is just part of life, so it is part of the delusion.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Time interacts with attention in funny ways.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate. Ruth
~ Ruth Ozeki
Do you have to live to be a hundred to really grow up?
~ Ruth Ozeki
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. That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again. And just like that, you die.
~ Ruth Ozeki
It would be a while before Annabelle got back to reading Tidy Magic, but books are patient. We know how urgent and compelling your lives are, and so we bide our time.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Don't waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! 6.
~ Ruth Ozeki
We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century, Oliver said. Who isn't?
~ Ruth Ozeki
6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
~ Ruth Ozeki
this is what temporial stuttering FEELS LIKE like a stut stut STUTTERY RUSHING FORWARD in TIME WITHOUT a MOMENT OR an INSTANT TO DISTINGUISH ONE INSTANCE from THE next GROWING EVER LOUDER AND LOUDER WITHOUT PUNCTUATION until SUDDENLY WITHOUT WARNING IT stops.
~ Ruth Ozeki
I don't know how to explain it, except that this one is like playing origami with time.
~ Ruth Ozeki
What is the half-life of information?
~ Ruth Ozeki
memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
~ Ruth Ozeki
For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop, For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor, For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms, For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha, For the time being, a monk's staff or a master's fly- swatter, For the time being, a pillar or a lantern, For the time being, any Dick or Jane, For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.
~ Ruth Ozeki
He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing, Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.
~ Ruth Ozeki
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.
~ Ruth Ozeki
memories are time beings
~ Ruth Ozeki
Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that's what a drum does. 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.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Yes, it's good to remember. A lot of people have asked your question, Benny. It's probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn't mean it's not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things
~ Ruth Ozeki