Ruth Ozeki Quotes

“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

“Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion.”
― Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

“She explained to me that young people need lots of exercise and that we should exhaust ourselves on a daily basis or else we would have troublesome thoughts and dreams, which would result in troublesome actions.”
― Ruth Ozeki

“You've probably seen him. The photograph shows a tiny man in a white shirt and dark pants, diving head first down the slick steel side of the building. Next to that gigantic building, he's just a small, dark squiggle, and at first you think he's a piece of lint or dust on the camera lens that got onto the picture by mistake. It's only when you look closely that you understand. The squiggle is human. A time being. A life. His arms are next to his body and his one knee is bent, like he's doing an Irish jig, only upside down. It's all wrong. He shouldn't be dancing. He shouldn't be there at all.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being