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Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki Books

Novelist

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“At one extreme...the hours seemed to aggregate and sell 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 and standing in water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focussed but vast and time felt like a limpid pool ringed by sunlit ferns.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“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.”

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Book:All Over Creation
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“If Zen master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and the hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We, too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters.”

HumanityThings That MatterDecolonizationReparationsAnthropoceneReclamations
Book:The Book of Form and Emptiness
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“You've probably seen him. The photograph shows a tiny man in a white shirt and dark pants, diving head first down the slick steel side of the building. Next to that gigantic building, he's just a small, dark squiggle, and at first you think he's a piece of lint or dust on the camera lens that got onto the picture by mistake. It's only when you look closely that you understand. The squiggle is human. A time being. A life. His arms are next to his body and his one knee is bent, like he's doing an Irish jig, only upside down. It's all wrong. He shouldn't be dancing. He shouldn't be there at all.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“Se você começar a estalar os dedos agora e estalá-los 98.463.077 vezes sem parar, o sol irá subir e se por, e o céu ficará escuro e a noite vai avançar, e todos estarão dormindo enquanto você continuar estalando os dedos até que, finalmente, um pouco depois do amanhecer, depois de contar o seu 98.463.077º estalar de dedos, você vai experimentar a sensação verdadeiramente íntima de estar consciente e saber exatamente como passou cada momento de um dia de sua vida.' [...] O experimento hipotético que havia proposto era extravagante, mas a premissa era simples. Tudo no universo está em constante mudança, nada fica igual, e nós precisamos compreender a rapidez com que o tempo passa se quisermos despertar e começar a viver realmente as nossas vidas. 'É isso que significa ser um ser-tempo', a velha Jiko me disse, e depois estalou mais uma vez os dedos tortos. 'Até que isso basta e você morre.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“What do scissors sound like? What did they say? Sly and steely, they started softly, a small susurration that quickly grew, whispering and slicing, hissing and metallic, forming what sounded more like human words, in a language Benny took to be Chinese, although he couldn't be sure. He didn't speak Chinese, so how could he know? But he seemed to understand all the snide, snippy things they insinuated into his ear about his teacher, Ms. Pauley.”

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Book:The Book of Form and Emptiness
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“Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing. "Not same," old Jiko would have said. "Not different, either.”

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“I don't know why I keep asking you these questions. It's not like I expect you to answer, and even if you did answer, how would I know? But maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe when I ask you a question like "You doing okay?" you should just tell me, even if I can't hear you, and then I'll just sit here and imagine what you might say. You might say, "sure thing, Nao. I'm okay. I'm doing just fine.” "Okay, awesome" I would say to you, and then we would smile at each other across time like we were friends, because we are friends by now, aren't we?”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“Otaku (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, 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.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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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 things that have served us well.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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“Main Street is dead, which is no news to the families whose families ran family businesses on Main Street. When I returned...I found that all the local businesses from my childhood had been extirpated by Wal-Mart. If there is one single symbol for the demise of regional American culture, it is this superstore prototype, a huge capitalist boot that stomped the moms and pops, like soft, damp worms, to death. Don’t get me wrong. I love Wal-Mart. There is nothing I like more than to consign a mindless afternoon to those aisles, suspending thought, judgment. It’s like television. But to a documentarian of American culture, Wal-Mart is a nightmare. When it comes to towns, Hope, Alabama, becomes the same as Hope, Wyoming, or, for that matter, Hope, Alaska, and in the end, all that remains of our pioneering aspirations are the confused and self-conscious simulacra of relic culture: Ye Olde Curiosities ‘n’ Copie Shoppe, Deadeye Dick’s Saloon and Karaoke Bar—ingenious hybrids and strange global grafts that are the local businessperson’s only chance of survival in economies of scale.”

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Book:My Year of Meats
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“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 to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.”

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“For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop, For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor, For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms, For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha, For the time being, a monk's staff or a master's fly- swatter, For the time being, a pillar or a lantern, For the time being, any Dick or Jane, For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.”

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Book:A Tale for the Time Being
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