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Top Ruth Ozeki Quotes

Browse top 33 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ruth Ozeki.

Favorite Ruth Ozeki Quotes

1. "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
2. "For the time beingWords scatterAre they fallen leaves?" ~ Ruth Ozeki
3. "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
4. "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
5. "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
6. "... 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
7. "Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!" ~ Ruth Ozeki
8. "She smiled. "Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao." ~ Ruth Ozeki
9. "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
10. "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
11. "What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?" ~ Ruth Ozeki
12. "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
13. "An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again." ~ Ruth Ozeki
14. "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
15. "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
16. "She'd been betwitched. She'd pricked her finger and had fallen into a deep, comalike sleep." ~ Ruth Ozeki
17. "Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay?" ~ Ruth Ozeki
18. "No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown." ~ Ruth Ozeki
19. "...but by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island.." ~ Ruth Ozeki
20. "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
21. "I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices." ~ Ruth Ozeki
22. "Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away." ~ Ruth Ozeki
23. "Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke." ~ Ruth Ozeki
24. "It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history." ~ Ruth Ozeki
25. "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
26. "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
27. "Jiko looked out accross the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave." ~ Ruth Ozeki
28. "... and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree ..." ~ Ruth Ozeki
29. "As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener." ~ Ruth Ozeki
30. "I'm a novelist," Ruth said. "I can't help it. My narrative preferences are all I've got." ~ Ruth Ozeki
31. "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
32. "Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose." ~ Ruth Ozeki
33. "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

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Today's Quote

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the pastI know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast"
Author: Bob Dylan

What Did Ruth Ozeki Talk About?

She
Hen
Ear
Thin
Wit
Self
Per
Here
Hey
Ally
Cause
Era
Away
Old
Con
Use
Low
Care
Sit
Hum
Tan
Hit
Does
Land
Sin
Says
Read
Again
Ten
Said
Deep
Wake
Act
Slowly
Ask
Los
Lit
Ought
Mean
End
Son
Bee
Lie
Sing
Though
Hear
Turn
Slow
Understand
Ears

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