Top 160 Ruth Ozeki Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Because, you see, this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience.”

— Ruth Ozeki

102. “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

103. “At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave.”

— Ruth Ozeki

104. “By the time we, consumers, are aware of processes like genetic engineering, they’re already being done. It’s sort of like the war in Iraq: By the time we know about it, it’s almost a fait accompli. And that’s certainly true with science.”

— Ruth Ozeki

105. “In Japan if you say “the war,” people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it’s different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific.”

— Ruth Ozeki

106. “Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen,” he said, without looking up. “I.”

— Ruth Ozeki

107. “Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.”

— Ruth Ozeki

108. “When Im writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.”

— Ruth Ozeki

109. “He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.”

— Ruth Ozeki

110. “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

111. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

112. “She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.”

— Ruth Ozeki

113. “I’m reaching through time to touch you... you’re reaching back to touch me.”

— Ruth Ozeki

114. “Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.”

— Ruth Ozeki

115. “I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful.”

— Ruth Ozeki

116. “I don’t hate anybody.”

— Ruth Ozeki

117. “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?”

— Ruth Ozeki

118. “My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.”

— Ruth Ozeki

119. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

120. “I am more grateful now than ever for the way you raised us, teaching us the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals, in the face of the fascism that is sweeping our country.”

— Ruth Ozeki

121. “If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.”

— Ruth Ozeki

122. “She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in troublesome actions.”

— Ruth Ozeki

123. “The moment I saw the gate I had a strong thought to turn around and throw myself headfirst down the steep stone steps or just let myself free-fall backward into the pillowy softness of eternity, and it wouldn’t matter if I bumped and bounced like a cabbage all the way down until I hit the bottom and then rolled out to sea, because at least I’d be safe and dead.”

— Ruth Ozeki

124. “Dreams are like doors. They’re like portals to another reality, and once they’re open, you better watch out.”

— Ruth Ozeki

125. “Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.”

— Ruth Ozeki

126. “My anger frightened me more than my fear once had.”

— Ruth Ozeki

127. “I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.”

— Ruth Ozeki

128. “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.”

— Ruth Ozeki

129. “Ze truth about stories is that is all we are.’ A famous Cherokee writer named Thomas King once said this. We are ze stories we tell ourselves, Benny-boy. We meck ourselves up. We meck each other up, too.” I wondered if the Aleph was in his poem, or if I was. That would be weird, to be in someone else’s poem, or someone else’s book.”

— Ruth Ozeki

130. “A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.”

— Ruth Ozeki

131. “A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.”

— Ruth Ozeki

132. “Music is like outer space, Benny. No need for flying to some other place. Everything is so beautiful right here.”

— Ruth Ozeki

133. “It’s probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn’t mean it’s not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it’s every person’s task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.”

— Ruth Ozeki

134. “Why was it that women could never work hard enough to quiet their nagging fear that they were not enough? That they were falling behind? That they could and should be better?”

— Ruth Ozeki

135. “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. – Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library.”

— Ruth Ozeki

136. “Disaster can strike at any moment, but we forget this, distracted by the bright, shiny comforts of our everyday lives. Wrapped in a false sense of security, we fall asleep, and in this dream, our life passes.”

— Ruth Ozeki

137. “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. – Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels.”

— Ruth Ozeki

138. “Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.”

— Ruth Ozeki

139. “The beaches were overrun with jellyfish these days, the monstrous red stinging kind that that looked like wounds along the shoreline.”

— Ruth Ozeki

140. “What makes a person want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there any limit to the desire for more?”

— Ruth Ozeki

141. “In Zen we have a story. If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, “Oh, that’s too bad, but it’s not my problem”? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.”

— Ruth Ozeki

142. “Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.”

— Ruth Ozeki

143. “Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?”

— Ruth Ozeki

144. “The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.”

— Ruth Ozeki

145. “Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”

— Ruth Ozeki

146. “Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.”

— Ruth Ozeki

147. “When everything you think you own – your belongings, your life – can be swept away in an instant, you must ask yourself, What is real?”

— Ruth Ozeki

148. “Space and time were hopelessly entangled, and the present moment was growing increasingly remote.”

— Ruth Ozeki

149. “There had been moments when she’d sensed his presence nearby, like when the crows left her gifts, for example. Her trinket bowl was chockablock full of screws, paper clips, buttons, broken clamshells, bits of tinfoil, beads and stray earrings.”

— Ruth Ozeki

150. “Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn’t know it.”

— Ruth Ozeki