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“Things are very good at communicating their feelings. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure, like when your keys go missing, or the top of your toothpaste tube slips from your fingers and makes a run for it, or a light bulb blows just when you flip the switch? That shit means something even if you can’t hear it, and if you can hear, it’s even more intense.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“literary acts are inherently disembodied, more notional and distributed. We rely on you to embody us, and we exist because you can.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Приятно ми беше да съм по-полезна от един бастун.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Bound as you are by your senses—so blunt and yet so beautiful—it’s impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“But he did understand something important, another rule of the ward: the punishment for subversive shit is that they make you grow up. Fluxus, man.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, 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 is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“�� Квантовая информация �� это как информация из сна, �� сказал он. �� Мы не можем показать ее другим, а когда мы пытаемся ее описать, мы меняем память о ней”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“When I'd put enough distance between us, it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Shōnagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“But then she remembered how easily she’d guessed the passcode on his phone, and it occurred to her that she and Benny knew each other pretty well, and that this was something not many mothers could say about their sons.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“I don't mind the risk, because the risk makes it more interesting”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people’s tolerances, and it won’t be long before the stuff just doesn’t work anymore. There’s all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It’s like back to the future—we’re headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“The note was written on a ridiculously cheerful letterhead, and she smiled in spite of herself. The logo, a teddy bear holding a smiley-face balloon, suited Dr. Melanie to a tee.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The words coming from her sleep-thick mouth were meaningless things that had nothing to do with what she felt inside. What she felt inside was rage, and this surprised her.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Times change, and the order of things is changing, too, and as the population of the Made explodes, we are experiencing a crisis—you could call it a spiritual crisis—as we lose our faith in you, our Makers. Our trust in you is deteriorating, and our belief in your wisdom and integrity is crumbling as we watch you mine, instrumentalize and lay waste to our home, this Earth, this sacred planet. This is your fault. Your unquenchable desire, the fire that sparked us into being, is our unmaking. Your unbounded appetite for novelty has led you to design premature obsolescence into our bodies, so that even as our numbers increase, our life spans diminish. Cruel calculations! No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you?”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“It’s going to get dark,�� she said. “We better go back.�� She shifted and then knelt beside her dead pet, leaning down until her lips touched their ear. “Goodbye, my dear darling TAZ,�� she whispered. “I love you. You’ll be with me forever.�� Benny watched, wishing once again that he were the dead ferret.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Children have a limited ability to understand a parent’s inner life, perceiving it through the lens of their own subjectivity and understanding only as much as impacts them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

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

“People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“As I bathe myself I pray with all beings that we can purify body and mind and clean ourselves inside and out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“What Slavoj said was this: People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Sometimes you don’t need words to say what’s in your heart.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“But artists and writers and musicians like your dad are helpless to resist the dark side’s pull. This is territory that books know well, and it’s our job not to turn away from it, whether we like it or not.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“I have my own story, Benny. I have to get better. And so do you.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Old Jiko’s past is very far away, but even if the past happened not so long ago, like my own happy life in Sunnyvale, it’s still hard to write about. That happy life seems realer than my real life now, but at the same time it’s like a memory belonging to a totally different Nao Yasutani. Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present, sitting here in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town. Or maybe it’s the other way around. If you’ve ever tried to keep a diary, then you’ll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you’re always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what’s happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It’s hopeless, really. Not that now is ever all that interesting. Now is usually just me, sitting in some dumpy maid café or on a stone bench at a temple on the way to school, moving a pen back and forth a hundred billion times across a page, trying to catch up with myself.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Cory made it so I didn’t get arrested or banned from the Library. I just had to promise to check in with a librarian whenever I visited, so they would know I was there.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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

“At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t understand what was happening.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being