Ruth Ozeki

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said. "Who isn't?

By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

We place such crazy importance on physical appearance in our image-obsessed culture, on youth and beauty to define our sense of self-worth, that aging, by default, becomes a kind of defect, something secret and corrosive and shameful.

In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.

I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. If we can__ act on knowledge, then we can__ survive without ignorance.

People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.

Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

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.

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__e all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.

Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

Maketa,_ I said, throwing myself down in the sand. __ lost. The ocean won.__he smiled. __as it a good feeling?___m,_ I said.__hat__ good,_ she said. __ave another rice ball?

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.

Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control.

You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.

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.

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child. His warm weight was like living ballast, thrumming with energy, giving her substance. Folks were drawn to that.

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year.