Ruth Ozeki Quotes

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and be...

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthles...

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said. "Who isn't?

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about wh...

True freedom comes from being unknown.

Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it liter...

Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But d...

Together we'll make magic...Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once...

By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The n...

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels li...

For the time beingWords scatterAre they fallen leaves?

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leave...

Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exac...

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar...

As I bathe myselfI pray with all beingsthat we can purify body and mindand clean ourselves inside an...

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid,...

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forw...

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never...

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during h...

You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're ma...

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

I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural tr...

Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the ...

Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are para...

Live. For Now. For the time being.

What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist i...

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and...

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I ...

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most i...

Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing.""That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a w...

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if ...

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?

Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and o...

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it ...

Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”She smiled. “Was it a goo...

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

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the war...

(...) 6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of thos...

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

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are...

The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make...

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight ...