A Tale for the Time Being Quotes

“Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell 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 in standing water.

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“You can feel life completely by taking it away”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Le mal de vivre, 'the pain of life.' Qu'll faut bien vivre... 'that we must live with, or endure.' Vaille que vivre, this is difficult but it is something like 'we must live the life we have. We must soldier on.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless rhythm of time.

If I could only smash the clock and stop time from advancing! Crush the infernal machine! Shatter its bland face and rip those cursed hands from their torturous axis of circumscription! I can almost feel the sturdy metal body crumpling beneath my hands, the glass fracturing, the case cracking open, my fingers digging into the guts, spilling springs and delicate gearing. But now, there is now use, now way of stopping time.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell 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 in standing water.

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean...A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through? Her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall. The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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

“Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The past (...) It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn't now, then where did it go?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces, again and again.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people’s business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Maybe this is what it’s like when you die. Your inbox stays empty. At first, you just think nobody’s answering, so you check your SENT box to make sure your outgoing mail is okay, and then you check your ISP to make sure your account is still active, and eventually you have to conclude that you’re dead.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I think it's important to have clearly defined goals in life, don't you? Especially if you don't have a lot of life left. Because if you don't have clear goals, you might run out of time, and when the day comes, you'll find yourself standing on the parapet of a tall building, or sitting on your bed with a bottle of pills in your hand, thinking, Shit! I blew it. If only I'd set clearer goals for myself! I'm telling you this because I'm actually not going to be around for long, and you might as well know this up front so you don't make assumptions. Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let's you and me not go there, okay? The truth is that very soon I'm going to graduate from time, or maybe I shouldn't say graduate because that makes it sound as if I've actually met my goals and deserve to move on, when the fact is that I just turned sixteen and I've accomplished nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. Do I sound pathetic? I don't mean to. I just want to be accurate. Maybe instead of graduate, I should say I'm going to drop out of time. Drop out. Exit my existence. I'm counting the moments.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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

“At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in the liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though some force was at once goading her and holding her back. How to describe it? A temporal stuttering, an urgent lassitude, a feeling of simultaneous rushing and lagging behind. It was a horrible, stilted, panicky sensation, hard to put into words.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I'm sorry. I was just talking to the moon.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“...nothing in the world is solid or real, because nothing is permanent, and all things---including trees and animals and pebbles and mountains and rivers and me and you---are just flowing through for the time being.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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

“Death is certain. Life is always changing, like a puff of wind in the air, or a wave in the sea, or even a thought in the mind.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Whenever I think about my stupid empty life, I come to the conclusion that I’m just wasting my time, and I’m not the only one. Everybody I know is the same, except for old Jiko. Just wasting time, killing time, feeling crappy.
And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“There's nothing like realizing that you don't have much time left to stimulate your appreciation for the moments of your life.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I asked her once why she liked to hear stories like this, and she explained to me that when she got ordained, she shaved her head and took some vows to be a bosatsu.21 One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first. It’s kind of like letting everybody else get into the elevator ahead of you. When you calculate all the beings on this earth at any time, and then add in the ones that are getting born every second and the ones that have already died—and not just human beings, either, but all the animals and other life-forms like amoebas and viruses and maybe even plants that have ever lived or ever will live, as well as all the extinct species—well, you can see that enlightenment will take a very long time. And what if the elevator gets full and the doors slam shut and you’re still standing outside? When I asked Granny about this, she rubbed her shiny bald head and said, “Soo desu ne. It is a very big elevator . . .” “But Granny, it’s going to take forever!” “Well, we must try even harder, then.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being