Top 160 Ruth Ozeki Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding hands again. I was still thinking about what she said about waves, and it made me sad because I knew that her little wave was not going to last and soon she would join the sea again, and even though I know you can’t hold on to water, still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.”

— Ruth Ozeki

52. “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. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.”

— Ruth Ozeki

53. “Spinoza writes, “A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.”

— Ruth Ozeki

54. “But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.”

— Ruth Ozeki

55. “Writing a book is a way of thinking to me, the only way of thinking that I have found successful.”

— Ruth Ozeki

56. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

57. “And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?”

— Ruth Ozeki

58. “Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind.”

— Ruth Ozeki

59. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

60. “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

61. “Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?”

— Ruth Ozeki

62. “In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.”

— Ruth Ozeki

63. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

64. “Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen.”

— Ruth Ozeki

65. “Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose.”

— Ruth Ozeki

66. “In the time it takes to say ‘now,’ now is already over. It’s already ‘then.’ ‘Then’ is the opposite of ‘now.’ So saying ‘now’ obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t.”

— Ruth Ozeki

67. “As I have not much time left in life, I am determined not to be a coward. I will live as earnestly as I can and feel my feelings deeply, I will rigorously reflect upon my thoughts and emotions, and try to improve myself as much as I can. I will continue to write and to study, so that when the time of my death comes, I will die beautifully, as a man in the midst of a supreme and noble effort.”

— Ruth Ozeki

68. “Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.”

— Ruth Ozeki

69. “Although he claimed not to understand matters of human conscience, it was precisely his own conscience that led him to question the status quo, and which would cost.”

— Ruth Ozeki

70. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

71. “I don’t believe I exist, and soon I won’t. I am a time being about to expire.”

— Ruth Ozeki

72. “So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, “Hmm, I don’t really remember being born.”

— Ruth Ozeki

73. “When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don’t do that, you can’t write good characters.”

— Ruth Ozeki

74. “I’m pretty healthy and I don’t mind the idea of dying, but I also don’t want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who’s high on Zoloft and has traded in his Xbox for a semiautomatic.”

— Ruth Ozeki

75. “As we moved from Tokyo the world became greener.”

— Ruth Ozeki

76. “I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense.”

— Ruth Ozeki

77. “It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives.”

— Ruth Ozeki

78. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

79. “You never know who it’s going to be, or what they’ll bring, but whatever it is, it’s always exactly what is needed.”

— Ruth Ozeki

80. “So when we left the apartment, it was this doomed unreal feeling I remember more than anything else, like we were bad actors in terrible costumes in a play that was guaranteed to tank, but we had to go out on stage anyhow. The.”

— Ruth Ozeki

81. “It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.”

— Ruth Ozeki

82. “I’m sorry. I was just talking to the moon.”

— Ruth Ozeki

83. “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 words.”

— Ruth Ozeki

84. “Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm.”

— Ruth Ozeki

85. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

86. “What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.”

— Ruth Ozeki

87. “By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.”

— Ruth Ozeki

88. “Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.”

— Ruth Ozeki

89. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

90. “The eternal now,” he said. “She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point.” “Of writing?” “Or suicide.”

— Ruth Ozeki

91. “I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew I was only seeing a tiny bit of it, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen or felt before.”

— Ruth Ozeki

92. “Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it’s often largely imaginary – or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.”

— Ruth Ozeki

93. “The cat still seemed to be somewhat there with him, but only as an absence, a cat-shaped hole.”

— Ruth Ozeki

94. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

95. “On the far side stretched the open Pacific and beyond, but the crow could not fly high enough to see its way home.”

— Ruth Ozeki

96. “If time is annihilated, mountains and oceans are annihilated.”

— Ruth Ozeki

97. “You can feel life completely by taking it away.”

— Ruth Ozeki

98. “No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived.”

— Ruth Ozeki

99. “Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience.”

— Ruth Ozeki

100. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki