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“Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“And then, when she’s finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. And because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, becomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, My Year of Meats

“Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "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... If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance... Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“In Japan if you say “the war,â€� 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, A Tale for the Time Being

“Ignorance.â€� 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, My Year of Meats

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“...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, A Tale for the Time Being

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

“Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”
― 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. We are here to help you.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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, A Tale for the Time Being

“Spinoza writes, “A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I don’t believe I exist, and soon I won’t. I am a time being about to expire.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“But Hojo-san! The teacup isn’t broken!â€� He looked up, surprised. “To me, it is,â€� he said. “It is the nature of a teacup to be broken. That is why it is so beautiful now, and why I appreciate it when I can still drink from it.â€� He looked at it fondly, took a last sip, and then placed the empty cup carefully back on the tray. “When it is gone, it is gone.â€� That day, my teacher gave me a priceless lesson in the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness