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101 " She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them. "
― Ruth Ozeki , A Tale for the Time Being
102 " At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave. "
103 " What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. "
104 " There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I’ve already said this. "
105 " You can feel life completely by taking it away "
106 " Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing. "
107 " In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. "
― Ruth Ozeki , My Year of Meats
108 " Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift? "
109 " Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation. "
― Ruth Ozeki , All Over Creation
110 " Old Jiko says that nowadays we young Japanese people are heiwaboke.112 I don’t know how to translate it, but basically it means that we’re spaced out and careless because we don’t understand about war. She says we think Japan is a peaceful nation, because we were born after the war ended and peace is all we can remember, and we like it that way, but actually our whole lives are shaped by the war and the past and we should understand that. "
111 " It's the cold fish dying in your stomach feeling. You try to forget about it, but as soon as you do, the fish starts flopping around under your heart and reminds you that something truly horrible is happening. "
112 " Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time. "
113 " And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? "
114 " I don't hate anybody. "
115 " No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived. "
116 " 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. "
117 " 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. "
118 " What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through? Her fingers press against the rag surface of her dream, recognize the tenacity of filaments and know that it is paper about to tear, but for the fibrous memory that still lingers there, supple, vascular, and standing tall. The tree was past and the paper is present, and yet paper still remembers holding itself upright and altogether. Like a dream, it remembers its sap. "
119 " I’m a novelist,” Ruth said. “I can’t help it. My narrative preferences are all I’ve got. "
120 " Where do words come from? They come from the dead. We inherit them. Borrow them. Use them for a time to bring the dead to life. "