227 Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

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.

There's so much to write. Where should I start?I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.

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.

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

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.

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.