Kendall Rees > Kendall's Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“For the time being
Words scatter
Are they fallen leaves?”
― 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

“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

“For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.”
― 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

“At first I was like, No way am I saying that, but when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, "Thanks, toilet," and it felt pretty natural. I mean, it's the kind of thing that's okay to do if you're in a temple on the side of a mountain, but you'd better not try it in your junior high school washroom, because if your classmates catch you bowing and thanking the toilet they'll try to drown you in it. I explained this to Jiko, and she agreed it wasn't such a good idea, but that it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don't say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“True freedom comes from being unknown.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“... there's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,

"Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne."


.... (footnote) Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne -- "I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing."

"That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?"

Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "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

“Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you’re probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right hand, and your thumb tips come around and meet on top, making a little round circle. The place where your thumbs touch should line up with your bellybutton. Jiko says this way of holding your hands is called hokkai jo-in,113 and it symbolizes the whole cosmic universe, which you are holding on your lap like a great big beautiful egg.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I have a pretty good memory, 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

“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

“When I run out of the things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“I helped Jiko to her feet and we walked back to the bus stop together, holding hands again. I was still thinking about what she said 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 , still I gripped her fingers a little more tightly to keep her from leaking away.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where anemones would grow upon them like flowers. Pearls would rest in my eye sockets.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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

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

“Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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

“Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”
― 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

“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

“By entering the cave of mind and walking into fire. By making shadows bleed. You can feel life completely by taking it away.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“As I bathe myself
I pray with all beings
that we can purify body and mind
and clean ourselves inside and out.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being