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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e37e833 | Later on, I asked her [her mother], "How does it feel?" "What?" "When you can't remember things. Does it frighten you? Do you feel sad?" "Well, not really. I have this condition, you see. It's called osteo...ost..." "You mean Alzheimer's?" I said, helping her out. She looked astonished. "Yes! How on earth did you know that?" "Just a guess..." "I can never remember the name," she explained. "Of course not." "It affects my memory..." "...And .. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| b53c1d1 | 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 | ||
| a310504 | 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 | ||
| 6418d37 | 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 | ||
| 87c4537 | In trying to stop your tears, I was already obeying the officer's command to the letter, not out of patriotic allegiance, but out of cowardice, in order not to feel the pain of my own heart, breaking. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 33227e5 | 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 | ||
| 5b8cc31 | 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. | media spectacle | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 0fcf5e8 | I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance. | knowledge powerlessness | Ruth Ozeki | |
| d6cf54d | As I bathe myself I pray with all beings that we can purify body and mind and clean ourselves inside and out. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 35031bd | 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 | ||
| a730835 | As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| a842a03 | 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 | ||
| 4f736df | Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year. | mexicans migrant-laborers teaching | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 62b6487 | Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful. | motherhood time | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 153e3fa | I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.21 One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first. It's kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the bein.. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| afdb903 | 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 | ||
| d71cbd3 | 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 and you can never catch up to what's happening ; which means that is pretty much doomed to extinction. | time | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 5f487c5 | You wonder about me. I wonder about you. Who are you and what are you doing? Are you in a New York subway car hanging from a strap, or soaking in your hot tub in Sunnyvale? Are you sunbathing on a sandy beach in Phuket, or having your toenails buffed in Brighton? Are you a male or a female or somewhat in between? Is your girlfriend cooking you a yummy dinner, or are you eating cold Chinese noodles from a box? Are you curled up with your bac.. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 27d2d34 | Her failure didn't matter, because at least she'd been true to her impossible dream until the very end. | dreams end failure inspirational nothing-is-impossible trying-hard | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 3929a5c | Otaku (ota) is also a formal way of saying "you". ta means "house", and with the honorific o, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern otaku is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house." | language otaku | Ruth Ozeki | |
| df0d298 | Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I'm just wasting my time, and I'm not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy. 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? I mean, if you want to die sooner, yo.. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 7c5f9cc | Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| 64a3c4d | Next you just relax and hold really still and concentrate on your breathing. You don't have to make a big deal about it. It's not like you're thinking about breathing, but you're not not thinking about it either. It's kind of like when you're sitting on the beach and watching the waves lapping up on the sand or some little kids you don't know playing in the distance. You're just noticing everything that's going on, both inside you and outsi.. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| a0cb044 | You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion. | goodbye leaving ruth-ozeki sadness | Ruth Ozeki | |
| 82dc4be | Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used .. | Ruth Ozeki | ||
| aac93a0 | But there's still this combination of governmental ineptitude, shortsightedness, stinginess, corruption, and neglect that affected the Continentals before, during, and after Valley Forge that twenty-first-century Americans are not entirely unfamiliar with. While | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 16cf6a1 | In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast's power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, "Cheer up, everybody, we're part of history!" Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lila.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3934f15 | Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f695c6e | If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her? This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards. | humor new-york-city | Sarah Vowell | |
| 29d96b8 | You've become a clever man. | Richard Russo | ||
| dde2858 | Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht--" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up." | Richard Russo | ||
| e9417a6 | The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who'd taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl's arm with some annoyance, as if she'd have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt. | Richard Russo | ||
| 1dfd637 | Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully's opinion. Girl. | Richard Russo | ||
| c26bf5c | I also think it's possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today." He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? --" | Richard Russo | ||
| c0af028 | He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely. | Richard Russo | ||
| e60ba1e | A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: "A" followed by "B" followed by "C" followed by "D." Rather, it's a series of events linked by cause and effect: "A" causes "B," which causes "C," and so on. True, a person's (or a fictional character's) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices--fate and luck play a role as well--but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People.. | Richard Russo | ||
| 402446b | The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband. | Richard Russo | ||
| 3d4fac0 | Griffin's mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn't? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result). | Richard Russo | ||
| 1a626a5 | Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it. | Richard Russo | ||
| 66ca1a2 | the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. | Richard Russo | ||
| 2232b60 | After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts' impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble? | Richard Russo | ||
| 96ec6c6 | No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many .. | mistakes regrets wisdom | Richard Russo | |
| 15d35dd | I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again. | Richard Russo | ||
| bb45892 | Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time? | Richard Russo |