A Tale for the Time Being Quotes

“Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“But memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being.   To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“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.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you're not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You're my kind of time being and together we'll make magic!”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Yes," I told her. "I'm angry, so what?"

..... I went on, giving her an executive summary of my crappy life.

....

"So of course I feel angry," I said angrily. "What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask."

"Yes," she agreed. "It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that."

"So why did you ask?"

Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me, "I asked for you," she said.

"For me?"

So you could hear the answer.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so different from the superpower stuff that old Jiko could do, like moving superslow, or reading people's minds, or appearing in doorways, or making people feel okay about themselves by just being there.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The important thing was that we were being polite and not saying all the things that were making us unhappy, which was the only way we knew how to love each other.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The way you write ronin is 浪人 with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe was constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.

And just like that, you die.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Live. For Now. For the time being.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being