A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults)

my purpose for writing it before I die is to tell someone the fascinating life story of my hundred-and-four-year-old great-grandmother, who is a Zen Buddhist nun.

The dream took place on a mountainside, somewhere in Japan, where the shrill cries of insects broke the silence, and the nighttime breezes in the tall cypress trees were fresh and restless.

There was nothing there. No hands, no face, no eyes, no glasses, no Ruth at all. Nothing but a vast and empty ruthlessness.

“Language is the house of being,” he once wrote, and Dgen (a wordy man himself!) would no doubt have agreed. But MH’s labyrinthine Teutonic chambers I find exhausting in my present fevered state of mind, and what draws me instead are the quiet, empty rooms of Dgen. In between the words, Dgen knew the silences.

I hate email. It’s so slow. On email it’s never now. It’s always then, which is why it’s so easy to get lazy and let your inbox fill up.

At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces again and again.

I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears, and I have to brush them away, quickly, before anyone notices.

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.