Ruth Ozeki Quotes & Sayings

No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain. — Ruth Ozeki

Maybe all teenagers feel like they don't fit in. I never felt like a cool kid. I remember being bullied for being Asian. — Ruth Ozeki

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces, again and again. — Ruth Ozeki

Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now! — Ruth Ozeki

I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life. — 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. — Ruth Ozeki

When up looks up, up is down. When down looks down, down is up. Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different. Now do you see? It — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life. — Ruth Ozeki

If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated. — Ruth Ozeki

Next you just relax and hold really still and concentrate on your breathing. You don't have to make a big deal about it. It's not like you're thinking about breathing, but you're not not thinking about it either. It's kind of like when you're sitting on the beach and watching the waves lapping up on the sand or some little kids you don't know playing in the distance. You're just noticing everything that's going on, both inside you and outside you, including your breathing and the kids and the waves and the sand. And that's basically it. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.
If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time. — Ruth Ozeki

Everybody has fishes in their stomach so does Jiko. But the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki#1 and it was more like a whale. After she has become a nun, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away. — Ruth Ozeki

I don't mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting — Ruth Ozeki

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again. — Ruth Ozeki

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading. — Ruth Ozeki

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was 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

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly. — Ruth Ozeki

There's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,
"Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne."
... (footnote) Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne
"I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense. — Ruth Ozeki

It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening. — Ruth Ozeki

Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "Ignorance." 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... If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance... Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. — Ruth Ozeki

After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact - brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the
thinnest veneer. — Ruth Ozeki

In trying to stop your tears, I was already obeying the officer's command to the letter, not out of patriotic allegiance, but out of cowardice, in order not to feel the pain of my own heart, breaking. — Ruth Ozeki

In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. — Ruth Ozeki

Live. For Now. For the time being. — Ruth Ozeki

There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong. — Ruth Ozeki

And I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree ... — Ruth Ozeki

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you're probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in,113 and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg. — Ruth Ozeki

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists. — Ruth Ozeki

Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen. — Ruth Ozeki

The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity. — Ruth Ozeki

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters. — Ruth Ozeki

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

Together we'll make magic ...
Who had conjured whom?
She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure. — Ruth Ozeki

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

The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again. — Ruth Ozeki

2:58:36 And maybe here's a bit of insight: My face is and isn't me. It's a nice face. It has lots of people in it. My parents, my grandparents, and their grandparents, all the way back through time and countless generations to my earliest ancestors - all those iterations are here in my face, along with all the people who've ever looked at me. And the light and shadows are here, too, the joys, anxieties, griefs, vanities, and laughter. The sun, the rain, the wind, the broom poles, and the iron fences that have distressed my face with lines and scars and creases - all here. — Ruth Ozeki

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

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 ... — Ruth Ozeki

If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic! — Ruth Ozeki

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

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. — Ruth Ozeki

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books. — Ruth Ozeki

Spinoza writes, A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life. — Ruth Ozeki

When I write fiction, I have the illusion of being able to control these fictional worlds and these characters, and to make them say what I want them to say. Of course, the problem is that it is an illusion, and by the end of it you realize that you're not in control of it at all; the characters have taken over, and they're driving the vehicle. — Ruth Ozeki

Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers. — Ruth Ozeki

It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4. — Ruth Ozeki

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness. — Ruth Ozeki

For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still. — Ruth Ozeki

Am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. 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. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm. — Ruth Ozeki

When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write. — Ruth Ozeki

At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten. — Ruth Ozeki

...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. — Ruth Ozeki

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

The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other. — Ruth Ozeki

Soaking them in buckets of seawater, to which she'd add a handful of cornmeal and a rusty nail. She'd agitate the water several times a day, and change the water after twelve hours. — Ruth Ozeki

This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman7 of the Taisho era.8 She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty. And even though I may end up mentioning some of her love affairs, everything I write will be historically true and empowering to women, and not a lot of foolish geisha crap. So if kinky nasty things are your pleasure, please close this book and give it to your wife or co-worker and save yourself a lot of time and trouble. 4. — Ruth Ozeki

Schools while their dads are on company assignments, and then have to catch up with their Japanese grade level when their dads get transferred back. Only my dad wasn't on a company assignment, and he wasn't getting transferred — Ruth Ozeki

You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed. — Ruth Ozeki

We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves. — Ruth Ozeki

Few boys have been as fortunate as I, raised into manhood with only the gentlest of words and blandishments in my ears and the kindest of caresses upon my person, by a mother who sheltered us from everything that is harsh and ugly in this world. I was spoiled, utterly unprepared for cruelty, and perhaps this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not! You mustn't think I blame you. I'm afraid I must sound like the most ungrateful son in the world, when in fact the opposite is true. I am more grateful now than ever for the way you raised us, teaching us the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals, in the face of the fascism that is sweeping our country. The cruelest punishments now fail to bring even a tear to my eye, but the thought of the hardship you've suffered on behalf of your ideals makes me weep like a baby. — Ruth Ozeki

Every seed has a story. — 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. — Ruth Ozeki

It takes a long time to write a book. I'm not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It's not a delivery device, it's an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires. — Ruth Ozeki

I don't believe I exist, and soon I won't. I am a time being about to expire. — Ruth Ozeki

You can feel life completely by taking it away — Ruth Ozeki

Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it's the other way around. — Ruth Ozeki

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

Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets. — Ruth Ozeki

Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air? — Ruth Ozeki

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart. — Ruth Ozeki

She smiled. Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao. — Ruth Ozeki

And my coffee is Blue Mountain and I drink it black, which is unusual for a teenage girl, but it's definitely the way good coffee should be drunk if you have any respect for the bitter beans. — Ruth Ozeki

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

As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

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

So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, Hmm, I don't really remember being born — Ruth Ozeki

By the time we, consumers, are aware of processes like genetic engineering, they're already being done. It's sort of like the war in Iraq: By the time we know about it, it's almost a fait accompli. And that's certainly true with science. — Ruth Ozeki

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 — Ruth Ozeki

Yes," I told her. "I'm angry, so what?"
... I went on, giving her an executive summary of my crappy life.
...
"So of course I feel angry," I said angrily. "What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask."
"Yes," she agreed. "It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that."
"So why did you ask?"
Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me, "I asked for you," she said.
"For me?"
So you could hear the answer. — Ruth Ozeki

For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see. — Ruth Ozeki

In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny. — Ruth Ozeki

Have you ever bullied a wave? — Ruth Ozeki

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array. — Ruth Ozeki

I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me. — Ruth Ozeki

As I bathe myself
I pray with all beings
that we can purify body and mind
and clean ourselves inside and out. — Ruth Ozeki

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

When I run out of the things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate. — Ruth Ozeki

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. — Ruth Ozeki

Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things. — 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

Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand "flying" as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being. — Ruth Ozeki

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things. — Ruth Ozeki