Quotes from Charles Yu

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

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

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.

If a lifetime in the end is remembered for a handful of days, this is one of them.

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.

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.

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

The path of a man's life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn't anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man's ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history.

Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. Why doesn't this face register as American?

She says that is exactly what she's crying about. That everything is all right. That the world isn't ending. That we'll never tell each other how we really feel because everything is okay. Okay enough to just sit around, being okay. Okay enough that we forget we don't have long, that it's late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it's not going to be okay.

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.

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.

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.

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

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters. Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be.

He's asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. The first Chinese came in 1815. Germans and Dutch and Irish and Italians who came at the turn of the twentieth century. They're Americans. (points at himself) Why doesn't this face register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated?

He'd always be Your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad.

She used her heart to love him, not her head, not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. She used her heart, as a physical transmitter of love, and what came out of it was no more voluntary than gravity or time or time travel or the laws of fictional science itself.

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.

But really, it's probably just easiest to keep doing what I'm doing. You know how it goes. At first it's just for the time being, until you can get your own story together, be the hero in something of your own. You tell people it's your day job, you tell yourself it's your day job, and then, at some point, without you noticing, it stops being your day job and just becomes your job.

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.

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?

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

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.