227 Quotes by Ruth Ozeki

  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    I was thinking about what she aid 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, I still gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away,

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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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    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.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing."Not same," old Jiko would have said. "Not different, either.

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  • 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 know, then where did it go?

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  • Author Ruth Ozeki
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    I whispered "Now! ... Now! ... Now!" ... over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when "now" became "NOW". 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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    A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.

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