Top 160 Ruth Ozeki Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is fleeting. Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”

— Ruth Ozeki

2. “What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can’t get back in time to wake up?”

— Ruth Ozeki

3. “Everything in the universe is 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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

4. “Forget the clock. It has no power over time.”

— Ruth Ozeki

5. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.”

— Ruth Ozeki

6. “The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.”

— Ruth Ozeki

7. “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

8. “With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.”

— Ruth Ozeki

9. “Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?”

— Ruth Ozeki

10. “Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.”

— Ruth Ozeki

11. “But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.”

— Ruth Ozeki

12. “There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.”

— Ruth Ozeki

13. “True freedom comes from being unknown.”

— Ruth Ozeki

14. “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

15. “Great is the Matter of Birth and Death. Life is transient. Time will not wait. Wake up! Wake up! Do not waste a moment!”

— Ruth Ozeki

16. “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

17. “You can’t hold on to water or keep it from leaking away.”

— Ruth Ozeki

18. “I think that if we don’t learn to inhabit other people’s perspectives, then we’re never going to understand why people do what they do.”

— Ruth Ozeki

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

23. “A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it’s time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”

— Ruth Ozeki

24. “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

25. “Sometimes you don’t need words to say what’s in your heart.”

— Ruth Ozeki

26. “An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.”

— Ruth Ozeki

27. “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

28. “The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity.”

— Ruth Ozeki

29. “Suicide feels like One Authentic Thing. Suicide feels like Meaning of Life. Suicide feels like having the Last Word. Suicide feels like stopping Time Forever. But of course this is all just delusion, too! Suicide is just part of life, so it is part of the delusion.”

— Ruth Ozeki

30. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Live. For Now. For the time being.”

— Ruth Ozeki

34. “Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and its hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.”

— Ruth Ozeki

35. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

36. “It takes a long time to write a book. I’m not going to spend that much time trying to deliver a message. The reason I do it is because I want to understand something myself. It’s not a delivery device, it’s an inquiry device. Didactic fiction to my mind never works. It backfires.”

— Ruth Ozeki

37. “Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.”

— Ruth Ozeki

38. “Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.”

— Ruth Ozeki

39. “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?”

— Ruth Ozeki

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

42. “My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.”

— Ruth Ozeki

43. “Every seed has a story.”

— Ruth Ozeki

44. “When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.”

— Ruth Ozeki

45. “No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.”

— Ruth Ozeki

46. “Her failure didn’t matter, because at least she’d been true to her impossible dream until the very end.”

— Ruth Ozeki

47. “There’s nothing like realizing that you don’t have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life.”

— Ruth Ozeki

48. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

49. “Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image – or images, I should say – because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.”

— Ruth Ozeki

50. “We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.”

— Ruth Ozeki