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“Waves and starlings, pebbles and crows . . .”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, The Face

“time isn’t something you can spread out like butter or jam, and death isn’t going to hang around and wait for you to finish whatever you happen to be doing before it zaps you”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being. A book must start somewhere, and this one starts here.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“If skin marks the border where an I ends and a you begins, then that night they did all they could to cross it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen,â€� he said, without looking up. “I”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I have to hurry up and write them down before I forget. I have a pretty good memory, 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, A Tale for the Time Being

“I’m a novelist,â€� Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn’t know it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“Did he hear her? If he had opened his eyes just then, he would have seen his wife’s lovely face hanging over him like a pale moon.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“Could Pesto be his own observer? Interesting question. He used to like to raise his leg and study his asshole. It didn't seem like this observation caused him to split into multiple cats with multiple assholes.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The sound of those doors, locking him in, locking her out, was the sound of her defeat and failure.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better? No wonder they wanted simple rules to govern the way T-shirts should be folded, children raised, careers managed, lives lived. They needed to believe there was a right way and a wrong way—there had to be! Because if there was a right way, then perhaps they could find it, and if they found it and learned the rules, then all the pieces of their lives would fall into place and they would be happy. Such delusion.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that.”
― Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

“As I have not much time left in life, I am determined not to be a coward. I will live as earnestly as I can and feel my feelings deeply, I will rigorously reflect upon my thoughts and emotions, and try to improve myself as much as I can. I will continue to write and to study, so that when the time of my death comes, I will die beautifully, as a man in the midst of a supreme and noble effort.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Stocking up" is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.”
― Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats

“I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I’m reaching through time to touch you...you’re reaching back to touch me.”
― Ruth Ozeki

“He listened to the small, quick sounds of the typing lady’s fingers. Earlier, her tapping had sounded like raindrops, but now it sounded more like a flock of starlings lifting from a wheat field and then settling again, blending back into the Library’s ambient hush. Or maybe not starlings. Maybe waves. Maybe the starlings were changing into waves, washing up on the sand and tickling all the pebbles and tiny broken shells, before receding again. In and out, waves and starlings, the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, the rustle of a turning page, the exhalations of the stars, punctuated by an occasional snore—Benny heard all these sounds, rising and falling, and he knew, too, that they, like the voices he heard, were always there, and would always be there, coming and going, somewhere in the background.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The eternal now,â€� he said. “She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.â€� “Of writing?â€� “Or suicide.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Am I crazy?â€� she asked. “I feel like I am sometimes.â€� “Maybe,â€� 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

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“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, My Year of Meats

“saddened. Cheered at the thought of the many instants that arise and are available to do good in the world. Saddened by all the misspent moments that have piled on top of each other and led us to this war.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Kannon, with her thousand arms and eleven heads, who could hear the voices of things crying out. I said I could totally relate to that, and when she told us that Kannon was the Buddhist saint of compassion,”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

“In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“There had been moments when she’d sensed his presence nearby, like when the crows left her gifts, for example. Her trinket bowl was chockablock full of screws, paper clips, buttons, broken clamshells, bits of tinfoil, beads and stray earrings.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness