Quotes from Charles Yu

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 ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience.

If she could move freely between worlds, why can't you?

IDK, I never represented someone for self-imprisonment before.

The heart of the show, Black and White is 'dunt eat too much Chinese food.

The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

LOVE STORY FOR A GENERIC ASIAN MAN???

Why are we talking like this? "Sorry," you say. "Force of habit." "I don't want to practice dating, Will. I want to actually date.

I'm on trial for my own disappearance?

Am I the suspect? Or the victim?

If I have anything at all I am still the Hero. I am here. This was my story. This is my problem. I'm going back down there to fix it.

He says something you don't quite follow. You hear it, you catch most of the individual words, and yet somehow--you don't understand. This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it's across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance. The texture of everyday actions, simple movements and gestures, is harder than it looks. The great shame of your life that you can't speak his language, not really, not fluently.

My power, if you can call it that, and I don't think you can, is that I am able to take about two gallons of water from the moisture in the air and shoot it in a stream or a gentle mist. Or a ball. Which is useful for water-balloon fights, but not all that helpful when trying to stop Carnage and Mayhem from robbing a bank.

You wanted something to happen, right? " Rick says. "For all of this to be leading up to something? Closure," Rick says, pointing at the manila envelope. "That is definitely one way to have closure." "I didn't say I wanted closure. Drama. I said I wanted drama." "What do you think drama is, Murray?" "How about something more open-ended?" "Oh sure, that can be arranged, too," Rick says. "But even open-ended stories have to end at some point, right? Open endings, after all, are still endings.

The only free man," he would say, "is one who doesn't work for anyone else.

emotional muscle memory,

the inversion of the relationship, the care and feeding, the brute fact of physical dependency: If you don't do this, he can't do it for himself. If you miss a week, he sits in the dark.

the inversion of the relationship, the care and feeding, the brute fact of physical dependency: If you don't do this, he can't do it for himself. If you miss a week, he sits in the dark. Not that he'll die. Although there is always that possibility. But he'll be lonelier that day, hungrier.

Staying in character avoided all of that, allowed you to prolong your respective roles for just a bit longer,

BLACK DUDE COP Whaddya got? ATTRACTIVE OFFICER Restaurant worker says the parents live nearby. We're hunting down an address. WHITE LADY COP Good. We'll pay a visit. Might have some questions for them. (then) Anyone else? ATTRACTIVE OFFICER A brother. Seems to have gone missing. Black and White exchange a look. BLACK DUDE COP This might be a case of— WHITE LADY COP The Wong guy.

their marriage having entered its own dusky phase, bound for eternity but separate in life.

It's the way things are. You do the cop show. You get your little check. You wonder: Can you change it? Can you be the one who actually breaks through?

The reality being that they'd lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by. And it was just that: getting by. Barely, and no more. Because they'd also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing.

Why can't I just give up now?" I ask TAMMY. "I don't think it works that way," she says, but I don't see why it shouldn't. Today should be the first day of the part of my life where I can stop caring. Right?

But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident. Bad day at work and/or kid has a fever and/or miss the bus and consequently ten minutes late