Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye Quotes

“Not to be nothing, but to understand that everything is and is not actually concrete.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“To practice the Way single heartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment and daily life.” This stripped-down Buddhist aesthetic pervades all aspects of St Zen. Most St Zen temples eschew the fantastic sculptures of bodhisattvas with their jewelry and fluttering robes. Instead, Zen emphasizes rock gardens, green-tea caffeine-infused meditation, and single-mindedness.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“The distance between losing someone and accepting that they are gone is of course the very essence of grieving,”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“I often felt in those days that to be stuck in grief was to feel kidnapped against one’s will and forced to go to some foreign country, all the while just longing to go back home.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“In order to become myself, my mistakes and hardships were also necessary.” This was an essential way to view life. It was only by keeping this in mind at all times that one could live in the present. The practice of Zen, he said, was about looking forward and living in this way.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“People are not actually alone. Whether they are alive or dead, they are not alone.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Here in this country often chastised for its lack of mental health services, for its lack of a language to discuss suffering and depression, we were out in the open, ringing bells, writing down the names of the people we missed, praying for them, and planning on spending several days in their company because we missed them.

There was nothing private about our grief.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“At any point in life, man was like one of these mice: on his way up, hanging on for dear life, or on his way down.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“When Japanese people did gamman and tried to endure that which cannot be endured, they were harming themselves. "It is better," Maruko said, "to speak up and to express oneself. We must learn to do this in Japan.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“わたしが、わたしになるためにじんせいのしっぱいもひつようだ。”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Temples in general are notoriously cold places because they tend to be old, and even today they rarely have central heating. ... I got a sense of the hardship of winter in old Japan when I visited our family temple one February... I wore a hat, heavy sweater, wool socks, and two pairs of pants, and still I shivered under the kotatsu.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“All across Japan people have been suffering for a long time. A long time. And the tsunami has revealed our modern problems, and the limitations of how we now care for each other. This is what has happened to our country.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Endo told me that when he first read this story, he thought that it was about regret, and how people leave many things undone and unsaid when they die, and that the burden of such grief -- for the living and the dead -- is quite possibly the greatest torture any person will ever undergo. But then, as we discussed the story, we decided that it was really about how the man had let go and come to accept that the wife was gone, though the process had made him ill for a while.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Perhaps it is possible, then, to see through more than one set of eyes, if one learns to pay attention to one's environment in a slightly different manner than one is accustomed to from birth.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“Because Japan looks modern on the surface, westerners feel like it ought to be "just like us", and are surprised when it is not.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“There is also an element within the Japanese culture that persists in telling itself and others that it is special and unlike any place else in the world. The Japanese, in fact, are so special that only they can understand their culture.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“If you are a Westerner and you spend enough time in Japan—and you speak Japanese—you will eventually be told that you cannot truly understand the Japanese. Only the Japanese can understand themselves.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“And then an odd thing happened.I could, in fact, sense exactly where everyone was in the process of eating his or her meal”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“I thought of all the tender bonds that were torn by the tsunami, and of how we humans try and try again to knit ourselves together, and how we are at our best and our happiest when we do. I thought that of all the cruel and futile things that can happen to us in life, the very worst is when we are separated.”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“transcendent”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey

“In order to become myself, my mistakes and hardships”
― Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey