Ruth Ozeki: We Have the Opportunities to Choose

 

Quotes from Ruth Ozeki

Every seed has a story. 

I think that if we don't learn to inhabit other people's perspectives, then we're never going to understand why people do what they do.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

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. 

The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity.  

Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.

Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!