Top 66 Charles Yu Quotes

#1. There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #27260
#2. We're two sides of an infinitesimally thin coin. Slice the coin thinner and thinner, and we get closer and closer to each other. We can slice it arbitrarily thin, let the limit of the thickness approach zero. Slice it until there's no one or nothing in between, until we meet at zero.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #30143
#3. If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #55238
#4. People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #63378
#5. Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #104359
#6. You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you
might even forget yourself.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #162995
#7. You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #196614
#8. I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn't even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I am asking you to trust me. Trust yourself.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #199528
#9. Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you'll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won't let you stop?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #204865
#10. I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #217041
#11. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #252386
#12. All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #287788
#13. Probably it goes without saying, but time machine guys don't get a lot of action. Had a one night stand with something cute a couple of years ago. Not human exactly. Human-ish. Close enough that she looked awesome without her shirt on.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #303967
#14. You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn't been working out so great for me. Now never has.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #318274
#15. You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #332673
#16. 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 yourself and others? Do you care about other people, always, sometimes, never? Or only when convenient? What kind of person do you want to be?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #375034
#17. Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #438047
#18. 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 more, because they see it in me.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #448199
#19. 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 years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I'm not even particularly good at being myself.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #461929
#20. When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.
Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self. He steps out of a time machine, introduces himself as Charles Yu. What else am I supposed to do? I kill him. I kill my own future.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #497817
#21. Dog sighs are some form of distilled truth. What does he know? What do dogs know? Ed sighs like he knows the truth about me and he loves me anyway.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #501949
#22. If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it. narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #505493
#23. If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #546181
#24. Her love for him is not something that can be changed - it's physics, not emotion: It's the exact weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #577375
#25. I CAN'T FORGET. I'M INCAPABLE. THAT MUST BE NICE, BEING ABLE TO FORGET. IS IT NICE?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #737254
#26. I don't know what I would do without you. I don't know what I will do without you. I learned about the future tense, how anxiety is encoded into our sentences, our conditionals, our thoughts, how worry is encoded into language itself, into grammar.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #791190
#27. Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. What they said, when they said it, it is not now.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #855822
#28. It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to be.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #862075
#29. It's a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #940429
#30. That is to say, our physical ability to understand time has been honed by evolutionary pressures to select for traits useful for survival, in all aspects, and time perception is no exception or special case or even magical or mysterious case.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #951785
#31. My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #972028
#32. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #975192
#33. We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think. More complicated than you think ...

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #993772
#34. It's like all technology: either not powerful enough or too powerful. It will never do exactly what you want it to do.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #996508
#35. 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 it ends.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1026445
#36. You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1078195
#37. Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1094349
#38. Also, your operating system? You should be nicer to her. You love her, right? But you're just kind of mean to her. You should tell her. You should tell her while you have the chance.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1122550
#39. My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with a blank sheet of graph paper.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1166748
#40. Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1168175
#41. I can see how I am always in perpetual motion through time, how I can never stop, obsessed with the past, projecting myself into the future, clutching at and always failing to grasp the wisp of now.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1198991
#42. You are good," I say.
"No I'm not. I'm not I'm not. I'm not," she says. "I'm no good."
And then, softly to herself: "Am I?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1225308
#43. On the worst days, I feel fine. On the best days, I know I am not.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1285791
#44. 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.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1302798
#45. The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1333506
#46. Only, it's not an it. It's a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She's older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1347386
#47. 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, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1356910
#48. 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 find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. Total silence. Absolutely nothing. That's why I chose it. I know for a fact nothing bad can happen to me in here.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1437175
#49. 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 on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1488615
#50. 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 years.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1529252
#51. Everyone has a time machine. Everyone *is* a time machine. It's just that most people's time machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1556829
#52. We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1584707
#53. 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 places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different?

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1619023
#54. Chronological living is a kind of lie. That's why I don't do it anymore. Existence doesn't have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1630994
#55. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1633696
#56. Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to get lost in. By now it's past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1672741
#57. I have a hangover that feels like someone let a cat loose inside my face.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1690623
#58. You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1717641
#59. Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren't the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1752293
#60. This, then, is my choice:
I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.
Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1762341
#61. 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 in his entire life.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1765232
#62. This is what he has always wanted, or so he had thought, but now here he is, in the middle of a story of his own and looking for the exit, and realizing all the exits are blocked and then realizing that an exit is not what he needs.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1773901
#63. 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 close my eyes, and wait until tomorrow in order to find out.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1788238
#64. At some point in your life, this statement will be true: tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1805099
#65. The problem with unintended consequences isn't with the consequences, it's with the unintended. Just because you didn't' intend for something to happen doesn't mean you didn't want it to.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1835046
#66. A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.
In other news, once in a lifetime.

Charles Yu

Charles Yu Quotes #1846644

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