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Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever? And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It’s not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.
Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.
He wants me to go to Canada. He’s got this thing about Canada. He says it’s like America only with health care and no guns, and you can live up to your potential there and not have to worry about what society thinks or about getting sick or getting shot.
A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.
the granular nature of time: the 6,400,099,980 moments40 that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!
I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.
An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral,
Time interacts with attention in funny ways.
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 now, then where did it go?
In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé
Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it’s the other way around.
it was okay just to feel grateful sometimes, even if you don’t say anything. Feeling is the important part. You don’t have to make a big deal about it.
the good news is that it doesn’t matter if you screw up zazen. Jiko says don’t even think of it as screwing up. She says it’s totally natural for a person’s mind to think because that’s what minds are supposed to do, so when your mind wanders and gets tangled up in crazy thoughts, you don’t have to freak out. It’s no big deal. You just notice it’s happened and drop it, like whatever, and start again from the beginning.
“Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen,” he said, without looking up.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever played a drum before, but if you haven’t you should really try it, because first of all, it feels good to beat something with a stick as hard as you can, and second of all, it makes an amazing sound.
I really like drumming. While I’m doing it, I am aware of the sixty-five moments that Jiko says are in the snap of a finger. I’m serious. When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise.
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. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.
if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being.
He sat perfectly still, studying his hands in his lap. “I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill,” he said. “But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun.”
You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It’s your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Really, I am one of the lucky ones. I have been educated and my mind has been trained. I have the capacity to think things through. “To philosophize is to learn to die.”
“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.”
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.
“Language is the house of being,”
Montaigne wrote that death itself is nothing. It is only the fear of death that makes death seem important.
“Think about it. 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.”
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”—Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980.
