“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's okay to do if you're in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you'd better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they'll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn't such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don't say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
“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, quote from A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki
Born place: in New Haven, Connecticut, The United States
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“He did not often think of people as individuals, but rather as antidotes for the poison of his loneliness, as escapes from the imprisoned ghosts.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Pastures of Heaven
“Tell me now, Anna, he silently pleaded as she ran her finger over a rose petal. Tell me I could have a son, that we could have a son, a daughter, a baby, a future—anything.”
― Grace Burrowes, quote from The Heir
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