Skip to content

Portrait of Charles Yu

Charles Yu

(1976) Novelist United States

121 quotes in 359 categories

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Charles Yu is a novelist from the United States, best known for Inseln im Netz.

Quick Facts About Charles Yu

Born: January 1, 1976
Nationality: United States
Profession: Novelist
Notable works: Inseln im Netz
Known for: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Interior Chinatown

About Charles Yu

He also published the short‑story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. His novel Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for fiction in 2020, and he created a television adaptation of the book that premiered in 2024.

Awards & Honors

National Book Award for Fiction

Quotes by Charles Yu · Page 2

All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

Image

“On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.”

Best day

Image

“Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.”

Direction

Image

“The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind.”

Image

“Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.”

Image

You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.

Image

“I CAN'T FORGET. I'M INCAPABLE. THAT MUST BE NICE, BEING ABLE TO FORGET. IS IT NICE?”

Image

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

Image

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

Image

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

Image

“Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.”

Desire

Image

Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience... It will force you to move on and you will not…

Choices

Image

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce…

Elements

Image

You haven’t experienced awkwardness until you’ve seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

Awkwardness

Image

You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

Image

“Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for the re-creating the past, for dealing…

Time

Image

This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me. Or I can take those…

Action

Image

“Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No…

Memory

Image

“You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still…

Life

Image

“I don't know what I would do without you. I don't know what I will do without you. I learned about the…

Image

“I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting…

Image

“Also, your operating system? You should be nicer to her. You love her, right? But you're just kind of mean to her.…

Image

I don't know how, or whether it is even possible to predict what the world will look like the next day. I…

Image

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and…

Book

Image

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

Heart

Image

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected. Manifests itself in…

Image

I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a…

Image

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

Image

“The path of a man's life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn't anymore, and after that it begins…

Journey

Image

“Again with the physical universe stuff. What exactly do you think you are? What exactly do you think this place is? You…

Image

“The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word…

Apologies

Image

“I felt melancholy, I felt joy, I felt dread, I felt a sadness so deep it cannot be described in words. I…

Fear

Image

“The other half, Lost Tokyo-1, has not been located yet, although presumably it exists out there somewhere in the universe, a mega-demi-city…

Dinner table

Image

“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do…

Experience

Image

“All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All…

Appearances

Image

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

Image

How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so…

Image

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down…

Communication

Image

“There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades…

Memories

Image

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

Business

Image

Charles Yu by topic

Time (28) Life (22) Love (11) Time machine (10)