Top 100 Ruth Ozeki Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance.
Ruth Ozeki
#4. As I bathe myself
I pray with all beings
that we can purify body and mind
and clean ourselves inside and out.
Ruth Ozeki
#5. My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.
Ruth Ozeki
#6. The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity.
Ruth Ozeki
#7. 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
#8. Maketa," I said, throwing myself down in the sand. "I lost. The ocean won."
She smiled. "Was it a good feeling?"
"Mm," I said.
"That's good," she said. "Have another rice ball?
Ruth Ozeki
#9. In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.
Ruth Ozeki
#10. 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
#11. What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.
Ruth Ozeki
#12. 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
#13. I don't give a shit about pretty," I informed her. "I'm a superhero. Superheroes don't need pretty.
Ruth Ozeki
#14. 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.
Ruth Ozeki
#15. Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader's eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
Ruth Ozeki
#16. She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.
Ruth Ozeki
#17. I don't mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting
Ruth Ozeki
#18. But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children's history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
Ruth Ozeki
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. He's got this thing about Canada. He says it's like America only with health care and no guns, and you can live up to your potential there and not have to worry about what society thinks or about getting sick or getting shot.
Ruth Ozeki
#22. 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
#23. Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen.
Ruth Ozeki
#24. That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.
Ruth Ozeki
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
Ruth Ozeki
#28. The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.
Ruth Ozeki
#29. 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
#30. When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.
Ruth Ozeki
#31. It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author - me - is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
Ruth Ozeki
#32. I'm sorry. I was just talking to the moon.
Ruth Ozeki
#33. Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
Ruth Ozeki
#34. He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.
Ruth Ozeki
#35. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay?
Ruth Ozeki
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Now that I think of it, maybe she loves him because all his problems give her so much to pray about, and when you're as old as she is , and your body is like enough already, you need some pretty powerful reasons to stay alive.
Ruth Ozeki
#40. 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
#41. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.
Ruth Ozeki
#42. We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful.
Ruth Ozeki
#43. 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
#45. Language is magical - it's a form of conjuring. If you do it convincingly, readers will follow you.
Ruth Ozeki
#46. She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in troublesome actions.
Ruth Ozeki
#47. 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.
Ruth Ozeki
#48. With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.
Ruth Ozeki
#49. I'm a novelist," Ruth said. "I can't help it. My narrative preferences are all I've got.
Ruth Ozeki
#50. If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.
Ruth Ozeki
#51. 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
#52. The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.
Ruth Ozeki
#53. She'd been betwitched. She'd pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep.
Ruth Ozeki
#54. ...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
#55. 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
#56. Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.
Ruth Ozeki
#58. 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
#59. The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
Ruth Ozeki
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! 6.
Ruth Ozeki
#63. 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
#64. Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes."
"Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.
Ruth Ozeki
#65. Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.
Ruth Ozeki
#66. We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said.
"Who isn't?
Ruth Ozeki
#67. Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.
Ruth Ozeki
#68. I believe that in the deepest places in their hearts, people are violent and take pleasure in hurting each other.
Ruth Ozeki
#69. In Japan if you say "the war," people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it's different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific.
Ruth Ozeki
#70. 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
#71. I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too,
Ruth Ozeki
#72. So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, Hmm, I don't really remember being born
Ruth Ozeki
#73. I don't believe I exist, and soon I won't. I am a time being about to expire.
Ruth Ozeki
#74. 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
#75. When you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural.
Ruth Ozeki
#76. 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
#77. But 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
#78. On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.
Ruth Ozeki
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.
Ruth Ozeki
#83. Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.
Ruth Ozeki
#84. Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.
Ruth Ozeki
#85. Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience
Ruth Ozeki
#86. People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
Ruth Ozeki
#87. Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.
Ruth Ozeki
#88. Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.
Ruth Ozeki
#89. Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
Ruth Ozeki
#90. I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.
Ruth Ozeki
#91. She approached her memoir with a renewed sense of resolve. A rapprochement was what was needed. An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will, and ruthless determination to tame it again. She kicked the cat off her chair,
Ruth Ozeki
#92. I live in a beautiful part of British Columbia, and I run through the rainforest. I do have to look over my shoulder to check for a cougar or a wolf though, so sometimes it's not the most relaxing.
Ruth Ozeki
#93. Live. For Now. For the time being.
Ruth Ozeki
#94. We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.
Ruth Ozeki
#95. I'm pretty healthy and I don't mind the idea of dying, but I also don't want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who's high on Zoloft and has traded in his Xbox for a semiautomatic.
Ruth Ozeki
#96. No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.
Ruth Ozeki
#97. Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.
Ruth Ozeki
#98. When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.
Ruth Ozeki
#99. As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener.
Ruth Ozeki
#100. 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.
Ruth Ozeki
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