227 Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    I don’t believe I exist, and soon I won’t. I am a time being about to expire.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    As he ran through the dense understory, he could read the signs of arboreal intrigue, the drama and power struggles as species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or giant firs and fungal spores opted to work together for their mutual benefit. He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature, and he would come home, sweating and breathless, and tell her what he’d seen.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, “Hmm, I don’t really remember being born.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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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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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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