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29b9af7
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There's nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I've already said this.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c4e302e
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You can feel life completely by taking it away
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Ruth Ozeki |
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2dbda2e
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Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
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change
life
floating
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Ruth Ozeki |
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0d67b09
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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.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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55d2338
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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?
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Ruth Ozeki |
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2b95890
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Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c54aaaf
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Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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0870d42
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What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through? Her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall. The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet ..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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9081b2e
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Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don't know how to translate it, but basically it means that we're spaced out and careless because we don't understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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acc5625
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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.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c77e6fc
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Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c0f90b9
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And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
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Ruth Ozeki |
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a070c40
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I don't hate anybody.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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8535bc6
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No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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65e69ac
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There's so much to write. Where should I start? I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this: 'You should start where you are
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present
individuality
inspirational
startup
perspective
creativity
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Ruth Ozeki |
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6760aaa
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It is not true, what I said before, because I hated him. He was the war criminal, and after the war they hanged him. I was so happy I wept for joy when I heard he was dead. Then I shave my head and took the vow to stop hating.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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a50e2e2
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A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean...A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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f5334e0
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To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.
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spirituality
science
life
japanese
quantum-mechanics
meditation
sense-of-self
physics
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Ruth Ozeki |
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496fde0
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I'm a novelist," Ruth said. "I can't help it. My narrative preferences are all I've got."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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909afe9
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As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into wo..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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6a487ea
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Maybe this is what it's like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody's answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you're dead.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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acbe2cb
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The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the t..
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spirit
tofu
trash
useless
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Ruth Ozeki |
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98dcbe9
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By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
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shame
memory
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ruth ozeki |
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753943e
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Le mal de vivre, 'the pain of life.' Qu'll faut bien vivre... 'that we must live with, or endure.' Vaille que vivre, this is difficult but it is something like 'we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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2cfdea1
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After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact -- brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. 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. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, d..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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90d1e79
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she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people's business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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74ba7d3
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There's nothing like realizing that you don't have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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11e2e0e
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On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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f0569d0
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I think it's important to have clearly defined goals in life, don't you? Especially if you don't have a lot of life left. Because if you don't have clear goals, you might run out of time, and when the day comes, you'll find yourself standing on the parapet of a tall building, or sitting on your bed with a bottle of pills in your hand, thinking, Shit! I blew it. If only I'd set clearer goals for myself! I'm telling you this because I'm actua..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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87fd112
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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.
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youth
beauty
appearance
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Ruth Ozeki |
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ef8277b
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It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives
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Ruth Ozeki |
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8d434a6
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I'm sorry. I was just talking to the moon.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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9feaaf0
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The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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1afc8c8
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nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things---including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and me and you---are just flowing through for the time being.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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280e773
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You can't hold on to water or keep it from leaking away.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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1bc688f
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As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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5d0334b
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If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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e8fa6af
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When a breeze blew, petals rained down on my upturned face, and I stopped and gasped, stunned by the beauty and sadness.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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9056421
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A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.
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names
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c65cf3b
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I've always though of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it." "Like Scheherazade?" "Yes," she said. "Spinning tales to forestall her execution..."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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db79c55
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I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time. If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling ..
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time
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Ruth Ozeki |
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10cd78e
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I started to think about how words and stories are time beings, too,
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Ruth Ozeki |
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e1595f0
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By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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749499b
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Somewhere Dogen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don't remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.
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death
life
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Ruth Ozeki |