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

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
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Similar Quotes by ruth-ozeki

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

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
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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.

Ruth Ozeki
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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 Ozeki
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What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes", and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so--it's a drag to be lectured to--but what does that imply about our attitudes towards intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books.I want to write novels that engage the emotions and the intellect, and that means going head to head with the chaos of evils and issues that threaten to overpower us all. And if they threaten to overpower the characters, then I have to make the characters stronger.

Ruth Ozeki
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You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.

Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation
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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.

Ruth Ozeki, The Face
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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’re all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
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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
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Maketa,” I said, throwing myself down in the sand. “I lost. The ocean won.”She smiled. “Was it a good feeling?”“Mm,” I said.“That’s good,” she said. “Have another rice ball?

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
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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
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