Quotes from Charles Yu

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.

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

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.

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

How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?

Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.

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 will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience... It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.

How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how may self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?

Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.

The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.

This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past. The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past. The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.

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

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?