Somewhere Dozen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.

— Ruth Ozeki

Taken is better than a home. Taken is a home that you can't ever lose.

— Ruth Ozeki

Take (おた) is also a formal way of saying "you". た means "house", and with the honorific お, it literally means "your honorable house", implying that you are less of a person and more of a place, fixed in space and contained under a roof. Makes sense that the stereotype of the modern take is a shut-in, an obsessed loner and social isolate who rarely leaves his house.

— Ruth Ozeki

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. Biko 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

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exist, but doesn’t know, then where did it go ?

— Ruth Ozeki

There's so much to write. Where should I start? I texted my old Biko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are

— Ruth Ozeki

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby's body. Only he wasn't a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful.

— Ruth Ozeki

Together we'll make magic... Who had conjured whom? She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was NAO the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.

— Ruth Ozeki

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough taken, 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

True freedom comes from being unknown.

— Ruth Ozeki