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“So, yes, we’re your book, Benny, but this is your story. We can help you, but in the end, only you can live your life. Only you can help your mother.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Unbelievable! It was a total setup. They were all watching me carefully now, my mom, Muji, Jiko, who I sensed could see me through her closed eyelids, and my dad, who was still on the balcony, pretending to be all nonchalant and casual. I hate it when grown-ups watch you like that. Makes you feel like a malfunctioning cyborg. Not quite human.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Words are scary, they’re powerful.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“I knew I was dead, even if my parents didn’t notice.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in the air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“It was raining a lot, too, and the rain knocked the leaves to the ground where they lay plastered on the wet black asphalt like little gilded fans. Ginkgo trees remind me of Jiko, and it always makes me sad to see the leaves and nuts getting crushed under people’s shoes and turning into yellow smears that look and smell like dog shit or vomit.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.

I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.”
― Ruth Ozeki

“Blame is just another way of refusing to take responsibility for your life, and when you blame us, you give up your own power and agency. Don’t you see? It makes you into a victim, Benny—poor little crazy victim boy—and you don’t like that, remember? And we don’t like it, either.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“How could words be so servile? So obedient to the status quo and blind to the conventions that bound them?”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“if the washroom was unreal, then none of what he remembered from that afternoon in the washroom could be real, either.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“It was true. It was unreal and my life was unreal, and Sunnyvale, which was real, was a jillion miles away in time and space, like the beautiful Earth from outer space, and me and Dad were astronauts, living in a spaceship, orbiting in the cold blackness.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“When I wash my feet May all sentient beings Attain the power of supernatural feet With no hindrance to their practice.   Of”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! 6.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Астрофизик Адам Франк сказал мне, что насчет квантовой механики важно помнить одно: несмотря на множество интерпретаций, включая копенгагенскую и гипотезу о множественности миров, сама по себе квантовая механика �� это только расчеты. Это машина для предсказания результата эксперимента. Это палец, указывающий на луну.
Профессор Франк имел в виду один старый буддийский коан про Шестого патриарха дзэн, который был неграмотен. Когда его спросили, каким образом он может понять истину, содержащуюся в буддийских текстах, если не может прочесть ни слова, Шестой патриарх поднял руку и указал на луну. Истина �� как луна в небе. Слова �� как палец. Палец может указать местонахождение луны, но сам он луной не является. Чтобы увидеть луну, надо смотреть за палец. Искать истину в книгах, говорил Шестой патриарх, это все равно, что принимать палец за луну. Луна и палец �� не одно и то же.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“I feel I should be moving away from the question "Am I still fair?" toward a more existential question: "Am I still here?" You'd think seeing myself in a mirror would be somewhat reassuring.
And yet, recently I've noticed that when I catch sight of my face in a shop window, I'm quick to look away. When I brush my teeth, I'll often turn my back to the mirror, or focus on a detail of my reflection, a blemish or a spot, rather than on my aspect as a whole. It's not that I don't like what I see, although that's often part of it. Rather, it's more that I don't quite recognize myself in my reflection anymore, and so I'm always startled.
Averting my gaze is a reflexive reaction, a kind of uncanny valley response to the sight of this person who is no longer quite me.
It's not polite to stare at strangers.”
― Ruth Ozeki, Timecode of a Face

“We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“In Sunnyvale, I used to think I was adopted. Some of my friends there were Chinese girls adopted by ordinary California parents, but I felt like the opposite, like an ordinary California girl adopted by Japanese parents, who were strange and different, but tolerable, because in Sunnyvale it was kind of special to be Japanese.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill Afghani people and Iraqi people, too. This would be my fault. I felt so sorry for those Arab people and their families, and I knew the American pilots would suffer, too. Maybe not right away. At the time those young boys were carrying out their missions, it would all feel unreal and exciting and fun, because that’s how we designed it to feel. But later on, maybe days or months or even years later, the reality of what they’d done would start to rise up to the surface, and they would be twisted up with pain and anger and take it out on themselves and their families. That also would be my fault.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . . These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this: gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . . I”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philosopher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It’s the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we’re crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That’s fucking crazy. . . .”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Anything is possible when you are young.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The temple drum is as big as a barrel, and it sits on a tall wooden platform. When you play it, you stand in front, facing the stretched hide, trying to control your breathing, which is jumping all over the place because you are so nervous. The priests and nuns are chanting by the big altar, and you listen for your cue, which is getting closer and closer. Then, at just the right moment, you take a big breath, raise your sticks, draw back your arms, and You have to get the timing just right, and even though I was scared to make a mistake in front of all those people, I think I did a pretty good job. I really like drumming. While I’m doing it, I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I’m serious. When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. 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, A Tale for the Time Being

“The point is that my son has a mental disability, Principal Slater, and you people know this, and if he’s skipping school it’s because the school is failing to meet his needs. So let’s talk about that, okay? Let’s talk about that.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Прошлое �� странная штука. Нет, правда, оно вообще существует? Ощущение такое, что существует, но где? И если оно существовало, но сейчас не существует, то куда оно делось?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“borrow them with no intention of returning them. But, Benjamin says, “Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“She is very angry with me,�� Slavoj said in a low voice. He leaned forward and gripped the wheels, trying to rotate them. “She says I am irresponsible. Ach, of course she is right! She says I am a fool to take foolish risks. But vat choice do I hef? I am a poet. Poets must take risks. And I am a fool, so my risks must be foolish. I see no way around this, do you agree?”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness