Quotes from Charles Yu

The thing about building a castle in the air is it's easy. You build up. It's like a little ladder, then you start building a castle in the air. Then, you destroy the ladder. And your castle is floating.

To have lived an entire life of productivity, of self-sufficiency, having been a net giver, never a taker, never relying on others. To call oneself master, to hold oneself out as a source of expertise, to have had the courage and ability and discipline that added up to a meaningful, perhaps even noteworthy life, built over decades from nothing, and then at some point in that serious life, finding oneself searching for calories.

And you think: no. It won't be somewhere else. It will be here, again, in Chinatown, next year, same place. To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.

This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you're smart. The less you say, the better. Try to project: Responsible, Harmless.

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.

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.

Once that gets going, doors start opening until they're all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

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.

The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain

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.

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

If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in the garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he'd find a way in.

He allowed it to happen, allowed himself to become "generic", so that no one could even tell what was happening. He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him. The defense rests.

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

all his life, all he's ever wanted was to be Kung Fu guy. But when he finally got it, he realizes what his mother meant. 'You can be more.

It's a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons.

Paternal Grandfather Remember the simple rule: you are to your father as your father is to your grandfather. Therefore, if you are male and terrified of your father, you should be exponentially more terrified of your grandfather. There are other issues related to your Earthling grandfather that are beyond the scope of this volume.

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

It was almost reckless how vulnerable she allowed herself to 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?

But the experience of Asians in America isn't just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else's experience or consciousness, he must define his own.

Bruce Lee was the guy you worshipped. Older Brother was the guy you dreamt of growing up to be.

From the opinion of California Supreme Court Justice H. C. Murray: When Columbus first landed upon the shores of this continent… he imagined that he had accomplished the object of his expedition, and that the Island of San Salvador was one of those islands of the Chinese Sea lying near the extremity of India… Acting upon the hypothesis, he gave to the Islanders the name Indian. From that time…

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.