Charles Yu Quotes

35 quotes in 728 categories

• You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A…
• This is what you have to ask yourself: Do you want to be good, or just seem good? Do you want to be good to…
• Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.
• I was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be…
• Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch…
• I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I simply have to…
• It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.
• Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth, I'll look at the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of…
• For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of time I could…
• Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
• I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It…
• I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness,…
• I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense,…
• Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming…
• There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how…
• All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her…
• You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.
• Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days…
• What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same…
• At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

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