Charles Yu

“Probably it goes without saying, but time machine guys don't get a lot of action. Had a one night stand with something…

— Charles Yu

“Maybe I'd absorbed the capacity to hurt someone by listening to my parents every night, who were under the impression that turning…

— Charles Yu

“A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days. In other news, once in…

— Charles Yu

“We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine.”

— Charles Yu

For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of…

— Charles Yu

Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren't the…

— Charles Yu

“I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.”

— Charles Yu

“My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize…

— Charles Yu

“How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how many self-murders is…

— Charles Yu

“I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn't even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I…

— Charles Yu

“My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph…

— Charles Yu

“It’s hard to have a relationship in this world. Other people are not the same from day to day. I might wake…

— Charles Yu

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone *is* a time machine. It's just that most people's time machines are broken. The strangest and…

— Charles Yu

“There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not…

— Charles Yu

“The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and…

— Charles Yu

“She used her heart to love him, not her head, not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or…

— Charles Yu

“It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be.”

— Charles Yu

“Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity.”

— Charles Yu

“You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the…

— Charles Yu

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.…

— Charles Yu

“Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last…

— Charles Yu

This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don't have to worry, you…

— Charles Yu

Worry was my mother's mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook,…

— Charles Yu

“It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be; you couldn't help but hate her for doing that to herself,…

— Charles Yu

“Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me)…

— Charles Yu