227 Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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?

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

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    Stocking up” is what our robust Americans called it, laughing nervously, because profligate abundance automatically evokes its opposite, the unspoken specter of dearth.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?

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